Ashton Kutcher and twin, Michael, open up about early brush with death, 'value of life'

Michael Kutcher had the flu — or so he thought.

His mom tried to nurse the then-eighth grader back to health, but all the fluids, the Tylenol, the rest, none of it was working. So in the days leading up to Thanksgiving break, she took him to the ER, where an X-ray finally revealed the problem: His heart had enlarged to four times its size.

The medical diagnosis was viral myocarditis. And the prognosis was sobering: When a heart gets to be that big, it simply can’t function.

“I'll never forget the night when the cardiologist said… ’You need a transplant and you have three to four weeks to live,’” Michael said while sitting next to his twin brother, actor and entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher, on an episode of “The Checkup with Dr. David Agus.”

The Kutcher brothers, who grew up in and around Cedar Rapids, appeared together in their first major interview for “The Checkup,” a Paramount Plus docuseries featuring celebrities sharing the triumphs and tragedies of their personal health journeys. Host Dr. David Agus is the medical director of the Ellison Institute, an innovative medical technology company, and was Ashton’s doctor in 2019 when he was suffering from vasculitis, a disease that attacks and inflames blood vessels, potentially causing organ damage and life-threatening blood clots.

Ashton, who in the throes of the disease could barely walk and hardly see, is “back to normal,” as Agus said on the show, and ran the New York City Marathon last year to mark his full recovery.

Back when Ashton and Michael were in eighth grade, hospitals were nothing new for the Kutchers. Michael was born with a mild form of cerebral palsy, and Diane, their mother, leaned on her mother’s intuition when local doctors told her again and again that her baby’s slightly slurred speech and minor slow motor functions would eventually go away.

“Our mom's kind of a bulldog in a way, so she would go and demand answers, and the physician would kind of brush her off,” Michael said. But then “she found an education center that helped her diagnose me with cerebral palsy.”

As Michael underwent more testing and tried new treatments for his enlarged heart at the University of Iowa, his parents kept the severity of his illness from Ashton and his sister, Tausha. Everything’s going to be fine, Ashton recalled them repeating.

But then Michael crashed, and the cardiologist told his parents they had two choices: “say your goodbyes,” as Michael remembered, or use an ECMO machine temporarily until a transplant can be identified.

There was one major concern, however: The ECMO machine, which pumps blood out of the body and oxygenates it before sending it back, hadn’t been used on a child before.

“My window went from three to four weeks to 48 hours with a chance that this might work,” Michael said.

Their dad picked up Ashton, who was staying at a friend’s house, and took him to visit his brother in the ICU.

“In hindsight, you realize they want me to see him because they don’t know where this is going,” he said.

While the then-middle schooler didn’t understand everything that was happening to his brother, he did understand that finding a heart that fit all the qualifications for his brother was going to be nearly impossible.

“I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, 'Wait, if anyone's a match, I’m a match,'” Ashton said. “So now you start running that cycle through your head. You’re like this balcony looks far enough to take things…”

Fortunately, a heart was found in time. Just before being wheeled back for what would be a successful transplant, Michael and his siblings shared “I love yous” at his bedside, an experience that brought the "value of life a little bit closer," Michael said.

“It's all because some lady checked ‘yes’ on her driver's license,” Ashton said. “She checked ‘yes’ on her driver's license and decided that the most generous thing that she can do with her life is give life to someone else.”

A strong relationship today, Kutcher brothers admit to ups and downs

Michael and Ashton’s mom, Diane, didn’t know she was carrying twins until just hours before their delivery. The ultrasound technology of the late '70s hadn’t caught Michael obscured behind Ashton.

Despite Michael’s cerebral palsy, as the twins grew up, “nobody in our family, nobody in our world, was ever pointing out a difference,” Ashton said.

“My parents really just kind of had the whole philosophy that Mike's gonna be able to do anything that his brother can do, and they’d challenge me,” Michael added.

The brothers were so close throughout their entire childhood and early adulthood that were “it not for the separation of air, at the time, there was zero realization that we weren't one entity,” Ashton said.

But when Ashton moved to New York in his 20s and his fame grew, the brothers’ dynamic changed. Ashton, by his own admission, had started to let success go to his head. And Michael couldn’t help but feel “jealous” of that attention.

“Here we are just like one and two for so many years, and then he goes off to do immense things and become a household name, and it really affected me in terms of just my own self-worth,” Michael said.

More:Do you know these famous Iowans? From Elijah Wood to Ashton Kutcher, there are a quite a few

The brothers eventually addressed the situation in a series of hard conversations, Ashton said, and “had this moment of reckoning and realization where we decided to tear down the walls that we built.”

“My brother's situation, I think gave me an appreciation for life,” Ashton said.

“When you have this face-to-face with death at that age, you instantly lock into this: ‘Let me do as much as I can while I can because I don't know when it's gonna be over,’” he added.

“And given the fact that you have this opportunity to be alive today, what are you doing with today?”

"The Checkup with Dr. David Agus" is available on Paramount Plus. To learn more, visit paramountplus.com.

COURTNEY CROWDER, the Register's Iowa Columnist, traverses the state's 99 counties telling Iowans' stories. You can reach her at (515) 284-8360 or ccrowder@dmreg.com. Follow her on Twitter @courtneycare.