Cristiano Ronaldo reunites with a teen whose life he inadvertently saved from a coma

Before Real Madrid takes on Legia Warsaw, Cristiano Ronaldo took some time on Tuesday to personally meet a teenager whose life he inadvertently saved. In August 2013, David Pawlaczyk was involved in a horrible accident where he rode his bike coming from a friend’s house, and a car crashed into him. He fell into a deep coma for three months, during which doctors were figuring out how to wake him. Via Diario AS:

After consulting a number of neurologists, David’s parents were told that sound therapy was the only hope of waking their son and were advised to play familiar sounds to him. Football was David’s big passion – he was a huge Real Madrid fan, so his parents started playing radio broadcasts of matches. Three months later, on November 19, David woke from his coma after hearing the broadcast of Cristiano’s third goal in the 2014 World Cup Play-Off tie between Portugal and Sweden.

Here’s the aforementioned goal, starting at 2:16 in the video:

News eventually got to Ronaldo through his agent, and Pawlaczyk’s family was invited to Madrid to see Real Madrid’s Champions League match against Dortmund, and to personally meet the star — Pawlaczyk got a hug and a signed shirt as a gift. Two years later, they’re older, but the gifts and gratitude are the same.

It’s really cool that, after all this time, Ronaldo still thinks about him, that he would go out of his way during travel to catch up with an old friend, and see that he’s doing OK.

(h/t Diario AS)