14 DAY TRIAL // A video recorded years ago on “Good Morning America” shows that Joan Rivers complained of having a heart condition that caused her heart to beat out of sync and for this reason she was afraid of undergoing any kind of surgery that required her to go under anesthesia.
Rivers revealed her condition on a 1985 taping of “Good Morning America” and said that her arrhythmia often caused her problems, even while on stage, “All of a sudden, you’ll be on stage and hear ‘tha-thump,’ It scares the hell out of me.”
The condition made it particularly dangerous for her to be under anesthesia, because her heart could stop beating. Interestingly, this fear never stopped Joan from undergoing numerous plastic surgeries which required her to be put to sleep. She managed to joke about this and called herself a “poster girl for plastic surgery.”
“When you go under, say for plastic surgery or something like that, that’s when your heart can go out of kilter,” Joan explained before adding “So I'm always very careful.”
Joan's final surgery was to repair damage to her vocal chords
In her final interview with the Sunday Times, just two days before she was rushed to the hospital in cardiac arrest, Joan mentioned that she needed to undergo surgery on her vocal chords because she needed her voice to perform on stage.
She joked that she held an “auditioning process” for doctors who were going to operate on her and that she would “ask them everything.” Anesthesiologists, in particular, would undergo scrupulous questioning from the comedienne, but she never took the fun out of it, “Who are you and when did you last have a glass of wine?” she would ask them.
It's not known if this heart condition led to the complications that left Joan in a cardiac and respiratory arrest on August 28, an incident that finally led to her death at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York on September 4.
The comedienne knew her death was going to hit her daughter the hardest
Also in her final interview, Joan predicted that her death was going to hit daughter Melissa the worst. Melissa was her child with husband Edgar Rosenberg, who committed suicide in 1987. “Melissa says, ‘I don’t want to hear about it, I don’t want to talk about it,’ but I say, it’s comi-i-i-ing!”
“It’s inevitable. It’s no longer an abstract thing. It’s like, God, I’m in my eighties. Nobody, when I die, is going to say, ‘how young?’ They’re going to say, she had a great ride,” Joan said.
