Yahoo Finance Christian Eriksen doctors did ‘great job,’ says medic who helped save Fabrice Muamba
Christian Eriksen has vowed not to “give up” as the London paramedic who helped to save Fabrice Muamba said the emergency medics did a “great job” in treating the Denmark footballer.
Eriksen, the former Tottenham midfielder, sent a message from his hospital bed in Copenhagen on Monday morning as he continued his recovery from a cardiac arrest on the pitch in the Euro 2020 match against Finland on Saturday.
In a message via his agent, Eriksen said: “Thank you, I won’t give up. I feel better now - but I want to understand what’s happened. I want to say thank you all for what you did for me.”
Pete Fisher, a London Ambulance paramedic who was part of the private stadium emergency team at Tottenham Hotspur when Bolton midfielder Muamba collapsed in 2012, told Standard Sport: “They did a great job. We don’t expect it with any sort of elite athlete. To see it with Christian and his links to Tottenham it was a bit of a shock.
“It’s a small percentage of people who do pull through but the big thing that Christian had was the chain of survival – the early recognition, early CPR, early defib, advanced medical treatment and transfer to hospital. All of that literally fell in place for him.
“From the time the [emergency] team was on the pitch to the point CPR was delivered, everything was just spot on.”
Eriksen is thought to have received 13 minutes of CPR. By contrast, it took medics 76 minutes to restore a regular heartbeat to Muamba – he had 15 electric shocks from the defibrillator on the pitch and 11 more at the London Chest Hospital.
Dr Andrew Deaner, a cardiologist who helped to save Fabrice Muamba, told Sky Sports: “In many ways, Christian has reacted to CPR and defibrillation in the way we would have expected Fabrice to have. We were really disappointed and surprised that Fabrice didn’t come round so quickly.
“The norm is what happened with Christian… It did bring back the memories, and I think I was numb and shaking a little and was so relieved when I heard that Christian had started to recover.”
Mr Fisher said: “At the end of the day, people were trained. When we were with Spurs, we did cardiac arrest scenarios pretty much every game. It’s having the right people doing the right jobs. For me, it shows the importance of having qualified staff who practise regularly.
“The days of the whole thing just being run by first aiders doesn’t happen anymore. There are medical professionals throughout all of these venues now – paramedics and ambulance technicians, and it is a big team effort.
“When I look at the Spurs stadium now, the work that I did there to set up the medical response, that is probably one of the safest places in the world to have a cardiac arrest.”
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