CINCINNATI — The Bengals and Bills play Sunday night, but it’s more than a prime-time matchup between playoff contenders. It’s the same teams and the same field where the world watched last January and prayed for a player who collapsed on the field.
What You Need To Know
- UC Health will offer a CPR workshop Sunday before the game
- The workshop will be at Fountain Square in downtown Cincinnati
- The event is free and is expected to feature Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval among others
Damar Hamlin is making his return, and Spectrum News 1 spoke with three members of the medical team who helped save his life that night: Dr. Valerie Sams, a trauma critical care surgeon; Dawn Schultz, an emergency room nurse; and Rob Hursong, a paramedic.
“If you’re on any sports team, it’s, you know, your role, like Damar knows his role in the football, you know, world and everything and we’re out in the field and it’s kind of like when we go into one of our trauma bays, we kind of all know our role,” said Schultz. “We’ve been taught it. We practice it so many times that we just kind of continue to do it. We’re a team.”
These caregivers said in many ways, Hamlin was lucky to get world-class care right away.
“I think to the advantage of a sports arena setting is that we’re able to get hands on the patient right away in those situations versus the world that I work in full time,” Hursong said. “Sometimes on other cases, there’s a six- to 10-minute delay.”
That’s why learning CPR is so important. The team from UC will be holding a free training this Sunday starting at 4 p.m. at Fountain Square before the game. They said young people are encouraged to learn, too.
“I think the younger you are, the better off we’re all going to be because you’re just going to continue to, you know, use it as you grow,” Schultz said.
They said the more people who know CPR the better the chance for positive outcomes like Hamlin’s.
“For me, I think the closure’s going to be Sunday when we’re back in the stadium and watching Damar walk back down the tunnel, that’s going to be the final piece,” Hamlin said. “I mean, for me, it’s been a long year.”
“I’m just so excited to see him return to the field,” Sams said. “He’s so brave, he’s such an athlete, he’s so disciplined, but he also just has such a great message. Even before all this happened, he was a great human being and he has used this as an opportunity to continue to spread the message that will hopefully save other lives.”
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