Ray Romano says he’s ‘lucky’ to be alive after doctors found ‘90 per cent blockage’ in major artery

Ray Romano has said he is “lucky” to be alive after a worrying discovery made by his doctors.

The Everybody Loves Raymond actor and Ice Age voice star, 65, opened up about a recent health scare in a new interview.

The actor had suffered for years with high cholesterol, that led to a 90 per cent blockage in his main artery,

“I had high cholesterol 20 years ago and my guy always told me, ‘Why don’t we start going on the statin?’ the comedian said on a recent episode of WTF with Marc Maron.

He continued: “Every time, I said, ‘Let me do it myself.”

Romano revealed that he “would go home and eat a little healthier and get it down a couple ticks”, but that his doctor would tell him: “It was 280 and now its 220 – you gotta get it down even more.”

“But I’d go home and think I was hot s*** – that was the cycle,” he added.

Romano said he spent 16 years trying to get his cholesterol down himself, but revealed: “I just had to have a stent put in” as he had “90 per cent blockage” in the artery nicknamed “the widow-maker”.

“I got kind of lucky that we found it,” he stated.

The actor, who said he is now considered pre-diabetic as his sugar levels are up, acknowleged that he found it “hard” to “sustain that diet stuff” and in retrospect he “would have gone on the meds”.

Romano, whose film credits include the Ice Age films, The Big Sick and The Irishman, played the lead role in sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond from 1996 to 2005.