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Reflections of a Weak Society?
Monday night, with a little over five minutes remaining in the 1st Quarter of the Bills-Bengals game, Buffalo safety Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest. He was attended by both teams’ trainers and EMTs and was transported to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center where he remains in critical condition.
The overwhelming opinion of the media and everyone connected with the game is that it could not continue and the the NFL suspended play.
Is it a sign of respect or sign of weakness?
On March 22, 1989, Steve Tuttle of the St. Louis Blues and Uwe Krupp of the Buffalo Sabres crashed into the nets and, in a freak accident, one of Tuttle’s skates cut open the neck of Sabres’ goal tender Clint Malarchuk, severing his carotid artery and partially cutting his jugular vein. Malarchuck lost a liter and half of blood. The Blues resurfaced the ice and the game was finished.
In 1940, Cincinnati Reds backup catcher Willard Herschberger committed suicide in the team’s hotel in Boston. (I wrote about his story here.) After a team meeting the Reds played the next day and completed the road trip to Brooklyn to take on the Dodgers.
The only player to die on the field during a National Football League game was Chuck Hughes of the Detroit Lions. With 1:02 left in an October 1971 game at Tiger Stadium vs the Chicago Bears, the 28-year-old wide receiver collapsed on his way back to the huddle. He was pronounced dead at Henry Ford Hospital.
Were we tougher back then or were we just terrible people?
Published in General
You put up a graphic from Gaad Saad, which read: “Every cardiac arrest is now blamed on the vaccine. Every weather event is due to climate change. Every case of autism is due to the MMR vaccine. Every terrorist named Ahmad was fighting against the Zionist occupation. Every mass shooting is due to the existence of the 2nd Amendment.”
As far as cardiac arrest, no that is not at all the case.
There is something statisticians use to understand any phenomena that occurs as far as numbers of incidents.
This is called examining the “excess” numbers.
A geologist I was friends with had garnered both positive fame and notoriety due to his noticing that there was always an excess of lost pets being reported above the norm, in local newspapers, right before an earthquake. Excess number considerations occurs across many various fields of endeavor.
The concerns about the cardiac situation has occurred because Dr Peter McCullough, an exceptionally skillful cardiac surgeon, began to notice significant numbers of myocarditis among the 16 to 49 year old crowd. Numbers that were above the norm, especially for anyone under the age of 35.
Statistician Ed Dowd noticed the uptick in fatalities in 2021 among the 18 to 40 plus age group – again excess numbers above the norm. (The demographic he was dealing with were well paid workers, who usually are much healthier then the slacker types).
Yes there have always been athletes in professional sports who die unexpectedly. Again, that number was on an annual basis, around 29 individuals.
But the steep rise in the excess numbers of deaths among athletes from 2021 on, as compared to years prior to Jan 1st 2021, is remarkable.
The NFL Canceled the Game for Damar Hamlin. It Didn’t After Chuck Hughes Died on the Field in 1971 (msn.com)
I note with approval that no Ricochet physician has yet posted on yesterday’s affair – even if there were publicly available enough information to make a remote diagnosis, no faraway practitioner should rush in to give one – but one doc from a decade ago did mention this sort of catastrophe.
I only ever heard of it because there was a one-page item about it in the New England Journal of Medicine, many years ago when my landlady and I subscribed to it. This was back when we’d actually read magazines. As I recall, a boy batting in a Little League game was struck in the chest by a pitched ball and collapsed. By the best luck imaginable, there were two physicians in the stands and a police car with an AED was rolling by. Competent forces instantly mobilized, and the kid was revived on the spot.
But I don’t remember any mention of the ballgame being postponed, or resumed.
However I do have to say, and apologize, that after my first reply to you, something seemed off on my end of things.
I do have a form of dyslexia, and it works on a subconscious level.
1100 pilot deaths seemed very high. So did FY 2020 having 100 collapsing and dying pilots.
The real statistics as I have recorded on my hard drive that were being reported by researchers like Berenson show this:
A total of one hundred eleven pilots died in the first eight months of 2021.
Comparing other years’ numbers: one pilot passed away in 2019, 6 passed away in 2020 and 111 passed away in the first nine months of 2021.
One hundred eleven is a magnitude away from my inaccurate 1100. (To my brain, both numbers are similar.)
Today’s NFL wouldn’t and shouldn’t have carried on with the game. But these headlines are submitted for your consideration:
Always honor the bravery of men like Damar Hamlin who play in violent NFL
Can the NFL ever be the same after Damar Hamlin’s shocking collapse on ‘Monday Night Football’?
I’m glad someone posted on this because I had been wondering the same thing. I felt that celebrating Simone Biles for withdrawing from the Olympics was a sign of societal weakness; not that she withdrew-she had her reasons-but that she was hailed as a hero for doing so. I did not think she should have been condemned or applauded.
In this case? I think I would not have condemned the NFL had they decided to continue, but I don’t condemn them for cancelling the rest of the game either. As with Simone Biles, I don’t applaud them either, I simply understand.
A few thoughts. I don’t think this is similar to the Pronger incident at all.
A hockey puck is a projectile. It’s traveling at 100 mph and striking a very small surface area. Same physics as the old Kung-Fu death strike from Bruce Lee movies. It’s quickly striking the heart at a very specific moment and knocking the rhythm out of whack. Pronger also staggers for a second before collapsing. He’s showing all the signs of a heart attack.
A tackle is hitting with a larger surface area. It’s blunt trauma, not precision. Maybe it’s possible that the point of the shoulder could create the same conditions. But it doesn’t look that way. Hamlin also gets up as normal after the collision before completely freezing up and falling backwards. Doesn’t look the same at all. I also saw the Dennis Byrd game of 1992 (on TV) but this Hamlin incident felt different right off the bat. Something wasn’t right.
But regardless of what happens, I dont trust the NFL to tell the truth. “The NFL investigated the NFL and found nothing wrong.” They’re going to cover for themselves whether this guy lives or dies. Because they pushed the vaccine nonsense harder than anyone. This is the same organization that allowed players to wear the names of murderers while lecturing us about ending racism.
And what bothers me is that most of the people “sending prayers” are religion-hating nihilists. It’s fake and empty. And its only happening because this is an NFL player. Nobody cared when this was high-school athletes. But the NFL is truly the holy sacrament of American culture. I haven’t seen this many “reach across the aisle and come together” moments since the immediate aftermath of 9/11. I don’t think that’s a good reflection of our culture and how we elevate hero worship.
I hope Hamlin recovers. But the wider context surrounding this incident is a sad reflection on our current state of affairs.
I wouldn’t blame the players for the cancellation; it must have been the executives checking on their social media betters.
I’m just curious on what basis you’ve decide he’s “exceptionally skillful”?
Well done – very much appropriate.
A woman in our Finance department collapsed at work one morning a few years ago. We have a firestation/Ambulance a few hundred yards to our South, and a full hospital and emergency room about a mile to our north. We have multiple trained first responders and two or three AEDs scattered around the building. Didn’t matter. She was probably dead before she hit the floor.
Everyone in the finance department left for the day. The rest of us didn’t get a lot done.
Actually, he technically did die on the field. A 24 year old man. When your heart stops and you’re not breathing, you’re dead. Not only did he have 9 minutes of chest compressions (causing blood in the lungs), but they used a defibrillator (AED) on him! The guy was dead. It’s no wonder his teammates (and even the opposing team) were so distressed.
You don’t see a dead 24 year old, let alone a beloved teammate die every day. I think they did the right thing to indefinitely postpone the game.
I haven’t followed this — at all — but in general, it seems that if something disrupts a game so significantly, they can do like auto racing does and just call it. Not postponed — put it in the record books with the score as it stands.
Obviously, if this becomes predictable, it will be gamed. Don’t ask me how, it just will. But it’s better than ignoring something significant.
I would say that nine minutes of CPR on the field is sufficiently distressing that there’s no “Yeah, well the med pros have him in the truck on the way to world class care so play ball” option available.
And if a guy flat-out dies on the field, I cannot imagine playing on. If it was done before, that does not change my opinion. “Game of this magnitude” be damned — it’s a game.
Let’s not read way too much into or over-analyze my comment. I didn’t say getting hit by a puck is the same as colliding with another person. Having watched multiple Forensic Files episodes, I’m well aware of the differences between getting hit by a projectile and blunt force trauma. Whether Pronger staggers before collapsing and Hamlin doesn’t was not part of my comparison either. Nor was I saying Pronger’s diagnosis was the same as Hamlin’s or as serious (obviously it’s not), as someone suggested in an earlier comment.
What I meant by “very similar” is simply and only this: player gets hit in chest, player has a a cardiac event, collapses to the ground, and has to be taken to the hospital. That’s it. That’s all I meant.
When I saw what happened to Hamlin, it immediately reminded me of what happened to Pronger (I was watching that hockey game live when it happened). If it doesn’t remind anyone else of that, fair enough.
A couple years back one of the workers in an adjoining part of my office building collapsed in his cube and our emergency responders and eventually paramedics responded and tried for an hour to get him living again. Sadly it didn’t work, but his co-workers just saw their buddy die right in their midst as their other buddies worked to bring him back to see his family another day. Management of that area had the sense to send folks home and offer counseling for anyone who needed an ear to listen. Even those of us who didn’t know the guy or work in his area, but saw the effort put forth were distracted and saddened for the rest of the day. Yes death is an every day occurrence that gets everyone eventually, but most folk aren’t going to come to near terms with it on a daily basis. It seems perfectly reasonable to let folk take a break and deal with what they’ve seen when that happens, especially if you’re involved in work that requires a high degree of concentration to avoid other injury or death.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury… Exhibit 2 entered into evidence:
Who’s talking?
Okay, you have a bit of a point here. I was in favor of suspending the Bills-Bengals game, but postponing the upcoming weekend’s games? Too far.
Question for you , Jimmy: Was the NHL wrong to crackdown on checks to the head? I mean, those were part of the game since forever. Or as we all learned more about concussions and their long-term effects, were they correct to try to eliminate “headhunting” from the game? After all, who cares if players are crippled for life because of repeated concussions, right?
Players on all the teams? Not just the Bills/Bengals game?
I’m trying to figure out how to express this . . . I wonder if the multiple traumas visited on the public over the last couple years (chiefly COVID) has resulted in some kind of societal PTSD, whereby things that we could once shrug off or soldier through now cause some kind of psychological distress.
Or, and this is more likely . . . it is expected to distress us, and so we perform as required. But it is, in fact, performative. In other words, people want to publicly display how deeply moved they are by an event — to an extreme — and part of communicating that is to show how psychologically crippled they are as a result.
“We’re just too traumatized to play!” signals one’s sympathies. It’s all about putting on that public display of performative trauma.
I know that sounds cold and unfeeling, but it’s the only way I can think of to explain what it looks like to me.
I produced 7 years of NCAA hockey. Fighting and head shots are not necessary to the sport.
“Mental health professionals.”
The usual suspects.
Agreed. Tolerating has enshrined it.
NHL is about this far from unifying rules under the UFC.
Oh, I agree. Was wondering what @jimmycarter‘s thought was, considering his comment about the NFL “…being infiltrated by pansies, kneelers, and chicks by force to take down the Men’s Only club.”
There is no mystery here. Almost certainly this was Commodio cordis, the stopping of the heart due to a sudden blow at just the wrong part of the cardiac cycle. Rare but it happens. New England Journal maybe a decade ago had a video of a fatal case in which the victim was struck with the palm in a karate match. He went down like a fallen tree and, (presumably) being in ventricular fibrillation, did not respond to CPR. Being an old soccer coach, I always kept this in mind if a player was struck and fell.
I know you like to have some fun, so I’m assuming that this is in that spirit.
Yeah, I didn’t get that one either, unless it’s intentional sarcasm.
A reasonable conclusion from that chart is that fall sports have more participants than spring sports. Always remember that most samples involving humans are selected and not random.
Yeah:
A) per what?
B) how about year on year
And the NHL has been cracking down (well, as much as it can) on fighting. Still happens, but one doesn’t see the bench-clearing brawls of earlier days. Though there is still the occasional “line brawl.”