As Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin stood on stage at the NFL Honors ceremony with a crowd of lifesavers behind him, representing the doctors and trainers who helped save his life after his cardiac arrest, he made sure to single one out who wasn’t there.
“My third night awake in the hospital, I met an ICU doctor. His name was Yousef,” Hamlin said.
He was referring to Dr. Yousef Raslan, a Brecksville-Broadview Heights High School graduate who is currently a chief anesthesia resident at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.
Dr. Raslan was not part of Hamlin’s care team, but he does work at the hospital where the football player spent a week. In fact, he also spent days there last March for a similar situation.
“I really do understand what he went through because I went through it myself,” Dr. Raslan said.
Three days after Hamlin woke up, Dr. Raslan visited him in the ICU and introduced himself.
“I’m young like you,” Dr. Raslan told Hamlin. “I was playing basketball, I had an arrest, I came here and I was really sick. But you can see me now and I just want you to know that I’m OK and I want you to see that you’re gonna be OK too.”
Hamlin told the crowd how grateful he was for that meeting.
“There was so much uncertainty at the time and just him coming to me and showing me that I could live a normal life again, it meant so much to me in the moment,” he said.
Monica Robins reports.
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Damar Hamlin
