General Hospital Alum Marcus Coloma Shares a Health Update: ‘This Was Scary’
Former General Hospital star Marcus Coloma, who played Nikolas Cassadine from 2019-23, opened up about his recent health scare and getting himself back in fighting shape in a lengthy Instagram post that also features a video montage of his journey. Set to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” the clips begin with a selfie video of the actor lying in a hospital bed, followed by a weigh-in at 195.8. Then, there are a series of clips of Coloma lifting weights, walking, jumping rope, and running, followed by a weigh-in at 181.6 with a trimmer, fitter physique.
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“Several years ago, I started feeling really fatigued,” Coloma explained. “I had done 300 episodes of a certain TV show, and never had problems with memorizing lines, the last week I kept forgetting my lines. Would go totally blank. I couldn’t tell what was going on. It continued to get worse, and I would not only feel mental fog, but I’d get really tired and would have to lay down around one or two o’clock in the afternoon.”
The actor’s first step was to visit a physical therapist, Rob, at Free Motion PT. The therapist “kind of saved my life because he said, ‘I want to check out your heart rate,’ and he found out my heart was beating at a resting rate of 110 bpm,” Coloma shared. “This was scary because your heart only has a certain amount of beats in a lifetime, and because mine was going so fast, I was cutting my lifespan down.”
Armed with this knowledge, the GH alum was able to begin investigating what was wrong with his heart to see if it could be treated. “I went to the urgent care to get some tests,” Coloma said. “Went to several doctors and finally an electro physiologist or an electro cardiologist who said, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna have to do surgery.’ So he went in. He did the surgery,” which took place in 2024, “and the good news is it was a relatively easy fix, and it was a relatively easy recovery, and once it was fixed, he said, ‘Look, your heart is actually perfectly fine. There was a birth defect. We handled it. You should never have problems again.’”
Once his heart was healed, the next task was getting his entire body back in shape, and the actor credits jiu-jitsu master Rubens Cobrinha Charles with helping get him back into fighting form. Added Coloma: “More importantly, it was a spiritual journey, and I realized that I’m not my body. The body is like a car and you can fix it and you can run it and it can help you get from A to B, but at the end of the day, I think the biggest gift out of all of this was an appreciation for life, and friends, and for people out there who helped me get back up.”
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