Orchard Park, N.Y. (WBEN) - The comeback kid? It was announced Tuesday by Buffalo Bills GM Brandon Beane that Damar Hamlin has been cleared by doctors to make a return to the football field, less than four months after going into cardiac arrest after sustaining a serious chest injury on the field in January.
“This was a life-changing event, but it’s not the end of my story,” Hamlin said a short time later. “I plan on making a comeback to the NFL.”
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Dr. Anne Curtis, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Medicine from the University at Buffalo tells WBEN she wasn't surprised to hear this announcement.
"Actually, I'm not [surprised]. I think it makes a lot of sense," said the doctor.
"The fact that he had the cardiac arrest immediately after a blow to the chest, that he responded so well to CPR and then came back 100% so quickly, it'll speak to a freak accident and not an underlying cardiac condition, that's what they looked for thoroughly. Did you have any evidence of a cardiomyopathy? Was there anything genetic there that could be a problem?"
Hamlin told the press in a conference on Tuesday that his condition was caused by Commotio Cordis, which is a condition in which an abnormal heart rhythm (ventricular fibrillation) and cardiac arrest happen immediately upon an object (usually something small and hard like a baseball or hockey puck) striking the chest directly over the heart at a very critical time during a heartbeat, according to CleavelandClinic.org.
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"You really have to rule that out by making sure there's nothing else there and so they did all that testing and found absolutely nothing else. Then you come back to the original conclusion, that being what the problem is... and it really is a freak accident."
The doctor said that the odds of this happening to Hamlin again is extremely unlikely. Dr. Curtis said that in order for an arrest like this to happen, you have to be as precise as a millisecond.
"That's why you don't hear stories like this about football every year, it's very, very rare. And it has to do with the fact that you have to have a blow to the chest at exactly the right spot, at exactly the wrong spot of the cardiac electrical cycle to make it happen. He's no more likely to have that happen than basically anybody else on the football field," the doctor said.
Dr. Curtis also says that if you have a cardiac bruise or contusion and it heals the right way, you can stand to recover quickly. If there's no scarring or abnormalities, you could be back up again and ready to go in as early as several weeks.
We saw this with Hamlin. Following his collapse on Jan. 2nd, he was back with his teammates in Orchard Park just two weeks later on the 14th of January, before their Wild Card game, a few days after Damar was discharged from the hospital in Cincinnati.
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Don't hold your breath and stress when Hamlin takes some hits upon return to the field, Bills Mafia.
Dr. Curtis says Hamlin's doctors are probably not looking for anything in particular when the safety makes his returns to the field.
"It's just highly, highly unlikely that it will happen again. I think there's every reason in the world to think that he'll be out there playing that first game."