Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin is making great progress after collapsing on the field and going into cardiac arrest in the game against the Cincinnati Bengals on Monday night. It was reported on Thursday that Hamlin is awake and starting to hold the hands of family members. Hamlin’s physicians, Dr. William Knight and Dr. Timothy Pritts from the University of Cincinnati Medical Center spoke to the media and said Hamlin used a pen and paper to ask who won the game between the Bills and the Bengals.
“You won. You won at the game of life,” his healthcare team told Damar, per TMZ Sports. Hamlin collapsed in the first quarter, and the game was called off. It’s likely the game won’t be made up, but the Bills are focused on getting Hamlin healthy. When the physicians were talking about Hamlin, they expressed how concerned they were for him.
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“We had significant concern about him after the injury and after the event that happened on the field, but he is making substantial progress,” Pritts said, per NFL.com. “As of this morning, he is beginning to awaken, and it appears that his neurological condition and function is intact. We are very proud to report that and very happy for him and for his family and for the Buffalo Bills organization that he is making improvement.
“He continues to be critically ill. He continues to undergo intensive care in our surgical and trauma ICU. He’s being cared for by ICU neuro-critical care teams, trauma surgery and a cardiology team, as well as our expert nurses and respiratory therapists. They are attending to him, and he still has significant progress that he needs to make. But this marks a really good turning point in his ongoing care.”
The physicians also gave credit to the Bills’ medical staff for responding quickly to Hamlin as soon as he collapsed. “We cannot credit their team enough,” Knight said. “There are often, unfortunately, there are injuries that happen on sports fields, be it football or others, but it is incredibly rare to have something be this serious that happens like that. And to be that quickly recognized, what they did was immediately marshal the emergency action plan, meaning the emergency medical services. That prompted the airway physician, the emergency physician that was out on the field to be at his bedside in less than a minute. He had a prompt recognition of loss of pulse, which gave him immediate bystander CPR, which rarely if ever happens.”
