Last April Jerry Lewis was near the end of his tether. Suffering from pulmonary fibrosis (a scarring of the lung tissue) and cooped up in his Las Vegas home, “I was wallowing in depression,” he says. What triggered his blues was not the fibrosis. Lewis, after all, is accustomed to illness: Over the past 20 years, the 76-year-old comedian has endured open-heart surgery (after which he gave up a five-pack-a-day cigarette habit), prostate cancer, diabetes and viral meningitis. Instead, what sent Lewis spiraling into depression was the treatment: a megadose of the steroid prednisone. “I put on 56 pounds,” says Lewis. “Because of the swelling, you can’t bend over and tie your shoe. I needed to exercise, but I’d get up and walk 20 feet, and I needed oxygen.”
The weight gain caused by the prednisone, an anti-inflammatory that can also bring on osteoporosis, put additional strain on Lewis’s spine, aggravating the chronic back pain he has been battling for decades. “It got so bad,” he says, “I went upstairs, and I was sitting in the master bedroom and thinking I know where the gun is and it would be over in a minute.”

In May 2001, however, Lewis complained of shortness of breath. Diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, he was initially given only a 10 percent chance of survival. Taking prednisone greatly improved his prognosis. Even so, Lewis was scared. “My partner died of respiratory failure,” he says of Martin, who passed away at 78 on Christmas Day 1995.
As the drug’s side effects increased and his fear turned to despair, Lewis says it was only thoughts of his wife and daughter that kept him from suicide. “With my sons, it was all about me,” says Lewis. “Dani is the air in my lungs.”