Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin woke up for the first time Wednesday night, two days after his frightening collapse during an NFL game, and wrote a note on a piece of paper.
Hamlin is now awake and appears to be neurologically intact, his physicians said, as they detailed his condition at a news conference for the first time after Hamlin collapsed and suffered cardiac arrest during Monday’s game. The doctors from the University of Cincinnati Medical Center spoke cautiously, noting that he remains critically ill, and is on a ventilator as his lungs continue to heal.
But the revelations represent the most positive news yet about the 24-year-old’s prospects for recovery, after fears that he could have suffered significant brain damage while his heartbeat was being restored on the field following a cardiac arrest. Instead, the physicians were talking about the next steps that could lead to Hamlin’s discharge from the hospital.
“We had significant concern about him after the injury,” said Dr. Timothy Pritts, a trauma surgeon. “He still has significant progress that he needs to make, but this marks a really good turning point in his ongoing care.”
Hamlin continues to undergo intensive care and receive assistance for breathing. “We would like to see him continue to improve, to be completely breathing on his own, and then to be ready to be discharged from the hospital,” Pritts said. “We really want to get him home.”
Since he woke up, Hamlin has communicated by writing on a piece of paper attached to a clipboard or by nodding and shaking his head because he still has a breathing tube, Pritts said. Hamlin has been able to follow orders—and “expressed surprise that he had not been with the world for two days.”
Those were among the signs that assured Dr. William A. Knight IV, who specializes in emergency medicine and neurocritical care, Hamlin “has made a fairly remarkable recovery and improvement…to the point he is now demonstrating that sign of good neurological recovery, as well as overall clinical improvement.”
“It’s been a long and difficult road for the last three days,” Knight said.
Both doctors praised the rapid response to treat Hamlin on the field, where Hamlin received CPR, had his heart restarted with a defibrillator and was intubated. Pritts said it was “fair to say” that if it had taken Hamlin even slightly longer to receive that medical attention, he could have faced a different outcome.
Everybody on the hospital staff who wasn’t immediately involved in caring for patients had been watching the nationally televised game against the Cincinnati Bengals on Monday, Pritts said, staring in disbelief at what they saw unfold.
The doctors said it was too early to say whether Hamlin would ever be able to play football again, but they added that a best-case scenario would be returning Hamlin to the same health he enjoyed at 8 pm Monday evening.
Just before 9 pm on Monday, Hamlin collapsed during the first quarter of his team’s game after making a tackle, during which he appeared to receive a blow to the chest. He then briefly stood up before collapsing to the ground. After receiving emergency medical attention, he was placed in an ambulance and taken to the hospital.
After a gut-wrenching scene in which players cried in front of millions of fans watching, the players eventually returned to their locker rooms and the game was suspended.
Football fans held a vigil for Buffalo Bills’ Damar Hamlin for a second night amid an outpouring of support from personalities across the sports world. The Bills said Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest and remained in critical condition. Photo: Jeff Dean/Getty Images
The cause of Hamlin’s cardiac arrest has not yet been confirmed, but the NFL’s chief medical officer on Wednesday named a condition called commotio cordis as a possible cause.
In commotio cordis—Latin for “agitation of the heart”—a sudden blunt force trauma to the chest affects the electrical system of the heart, causing an arrhythmia and cardiac arrest.
Knight declined to declare a diagnosis on Thursday, saying “we do not have definitive answers.” Commotio cordis, he said, is a “diagnosis of exclusion in our world,” requiring more tests to rule out potential underlying heart conditions that could have instead triggered Hamlin’s sudden collapse, seconds after the tackle.
“Is it on the list of considerations?” It is, but he has many things we need to work through before a final etiology, or cause for this arrest, can be definitively defined,” Knight said.
The news about Hamlin’s progress came as teams across the NFL steeled themselves to play this weekend in the wake of the terrifying incident. In somber tones, coaches of various teams described how they felt watching what happened to the Bills player. They also pointed to mental-health options and team chaplains who met with their players.
On Thursday, Bills coach Sean McDermott and quarterback Josh Allen spoke for the first time about both their difficulty processing what they witnessed on the field and their excitement over hearing about Hamlin’s progress. In a raw news conference, Allen said the scene has replayed over and over in his head, but that the latest developments have helped make the idea of playing Sunday easier.
“Being on that field, you lose sleep,” Allen said. “Getting updates and positive updates eases so much of that pain and tension that you feel.”
McDermott also said that when Hamlin’s father spoke with the team this week, Mario Hamlin told them his son would have wanted the team to play. McDermott also said that, after the teams returned to the locker rooms on Monday night, he left it up to the players if they wanted to return.
“They decided not to go back out there,” McDermott said.
The Bills are scheduled to play the Patriots on Sunday in an important game as New England vies for a postseason berth while Buffalo angles for a playoff bye and the No. 1 seed in the AFC.
As two of the top teams in the NFL, the Bills-Bengals showdown, which ended with Cincinnati holding a 7-3 lead, was one of the most hotly anticipated contests of the season. It also carried heavy playoff implications, and NFL executives said on Wednesday that they are still sorting through various scenarios on how to handle it.
After Hamlin’s positive turn, doctors had their own answer about the game’s outcome.
“When he asked ‘Did we win?’, the answer is: ‘Yes, Damar,'” Dr. Pritts said. “‘You’ve won the game of life.'”
Write to Andrew Beaton at [email protected] and Louise Radnofsky at [email protected]
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