Zach Braff Reveals What Happened to Nick Cordero in the Hospital Before His Tragic Death

Zach Braff was very good friends with the late Nick Cordero and his family, and he’s speaking about the heartbreak surrounding watching what happened to him as he died due to complications from Coronavirus at 41 years old.

“Just for clarity’s sake, he didn’t have COVID-19 anymore,” Zach said on his podcast with Donald Faison. “What COVID did to Nick is what it does to a lot of people, it comes in and wreaks havoc on your body. Then it leaves and you don’t have it anymore, but you’re left with what the doctors called ‘lungs that look like Swiss cheese.’”

“Even to live he would’ve needed a full double-lung transplant and you only get those if you’re healthy in all other ways. So the machines were really truly keeping him alive,” Zach said. “His blood pressure wasn’t strong enough so the tips of all his fingers and toes were blackening and they would have had to have been removed had he lived.”

Nick was on dialysis for his kidneys, a ventilator for his lungs, and would have needed a pacemaker too.

“He just deteriorated, deteriorated, deteriorated, until the point where they put him on the ventilator and then he never came back,” he added. “He kind of woke up for a little bit and there was some exciting moments where they would say, ‘Nick if you can hear us look up,’ and he would do that, but he wouldn’t do it all the time. It was only occasionally.”

His wife Amanda “was never able to see him fully conscious again.”

“This is how f—ing tragic it was — she would be 10 feet away from us, Florence [Pugh] and I, and sobbing, and we couldn’t go hug her. We would literally stand 10 feet away from her and watch our friend sobbing,” Zach added. Amanda and son Elvis, 1, stayed with the couple during this ordeal.

Zach revealed the final text message he received from Nick before he lost consciousness. He spent over 90 days in the hospital fighting for his life.

Our continued thoughts are with Nick Cordero‘s loved ones during this terrible time.