Hamilton-born actor Nick Cordero wakes up from coma
Nick Cordero is awake.
Six weeks after slipping into a coma with COVID-19, the Hamilton-born Broadway actor has regained consciousness and doctors are now talking about recovery.
“Nick is awake,” his wife, Amanda Kloots, joyfully beamed on an Instagram post. “He is awake.”
The news reached her at her Los Angeles home on Tuesday afternoon through a phone message from the doctor who’s been treating him. That message was immediately relayed to Cordero’s mother, Lesley, here in Hamilton. Who listened to it several times to make sure she’d heard it correctly.
“‘Awake’ is what I’ve been waiting to hear,” she says.
Convinced the news was what she thought it was, she played it for her other two children. Which launched a flurry of calls and text messages and set off a celebration more than a month in the making.
While she’s always shown an optimistic front, Lesley admits there were more than a few moments she wondered if this would ever happen. Each small step forward seemed to be followed almost immediately by something disastrous.
First the 41-year-old Westdale Secondary grad landed in Cedars-Sinai Hospital with an illness that was twice determined not to be COVID-19 before a third test found it was. An infection led to his blood pressure plummeting, which led to him needing to be resuscitated. As that happened, he suffered two mini strokes.
After he was placed on a machine to help his lungs and heart rest and recover, blood clots developed. Blood-thinning medication caused his blood pressure to drop dangerously low again, so it was stopped, but that caused a clot in his leg to cause further problems and led to his right leg being amputated above the knee.
There were more infections in the weeks that followed. When he improved enough for doctors to reduce the sedation, he didn’t come out of his coma as they’d expected.
But over the past couple days, he’d begun opening his eyes and following commands. On Tuesday, doctors said he was now truly awake even though he’s incredibly weak.
Lesley says the doctor is talking about next steps and recovery rather than mere survival.
The news led to an outpouring of celebration online where people have been singing and dancing to his song “Live Your Life” every night at 6 p.m. and then posting their clips as an act of optimism.
Mom hadn’t been posting her attempts, but she and the rest of the family had been singing and dancing every evening, too. And on Tuesday?
“We were all bouncing around,” she says.
The news was especially exciting for Kloots, who has a 10month-old son — Elvis Eduardo — with Cordero. The boy’s middle name was that of Cordero’s father who passed away not long ago.
Tuesday was his birthday.