‘Eight Is Enough’ Star ‘Died’ During Surgery

Susan Richardson died on a Pennsylvania operating table during touch-and-go emergency open-heart surgery — but lived to tell the tale to a source for The National ENQUIRER!

“I’m grateful to be alive,” the plucky "Eight Is Enough" star admitted. “It's a miracle doctors brought me back!” Susan went into Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Hospital in January, to have a stent replaced in a coronary artery, but docs found all four chambers in her ticker were about to fail.

She needed the risky quadruple bypass operation to live — but briefly went to the other side while on the operating table, a pal revealed. “The doctors pulled her back from the brink of death,” said the friend, and noted Susan “had to be placed on ventilator” to breathe afterward.

But Susan still wasn’t out of the woods. Two days after being sent home to the rundown Coatesville, Pa., trailer park where she struggles to get by, she was rushed back to the hospital on Feb. 1. A blood clot had formed in her left arm — and swelled to the size of a tennis ball!

“I didn’t want to go through this again!” Susan recalled. She also suffers from diabetes and has lost many teeth due to cardioesophageal achalasia, a digestive disorder that prevents her from eating and keeping food down.

She takes nourishment through a feeding tube, and narrowly avoided death last July when the tube burst! This time, Brandywine Docs operated and the friend said, “she has a big scar running up her arm — to match the one on her chest!”

Following her death-cheating dramas, Susan was overwhelmed with well wishes from her "Eight Is Enough" castmates. Willie Aames, Grant Goodeve (right) and Connie Needham (left)— who portrayed her siblings on the heartwarming hit — encouraged her to persevere.

“It was amazing!” gushed the actress, who played Susan Bradford on the Dick Van Patten family drama that ran from 1977 to 1981. “They said they were pulling for me to get better as soon as possible!”