In late November, Tuscon Roadrunners captain Craig Cunningham collapsed just prior to a game. Nearly a month later, he’ll finally be released from the hospital before Christmas after what sounds like a terrifying touch-and-go situation.
Coyotes minor leaguer nears hospital release after rare life-saving heart surgery
Craig Cunningham cheated death.
Cunningham, his mother Heather, and doctors spoke to the media for the first time since the incident on Wednesday from Banner University Medical Center Tucson. But a story in the Arizona Daily Star details what can really only be described as a medical miracle that kept Cunningham alive.
When Cunningham, 26, collapsed before a game against the Manitoba Moose on Nov. 21, team doctors administered chest compressions and CPR. By the time they finally got him to a hospital after 70 minutes of “staying-alive CPR,” Cunningham was bleeding from his lungs and living on a ventilator.
That Arizona Daily Star story offers a quite remarkable look into how bleak the situation was for Cunningham. This passage is particularly terrifying:
The procedure is remarkably complex, yet simple in its explanation: Cunningham’s heart was still in ventricular fibrillation, and because his lungs were bleeding, his blood was getting little oxygen. The blood in his heart at that point, Khalpey said, was black. Khalpey needed to circumvent the body’s natural blood pumping, using the ECMO machine to act as a temporary heart and lung, with the cannulas draining the side of Cunningham’s heart, the blood passing through a pump which pushed it into an artificial lung, which moved it back through the heart’s arterial side with fully oxygenated blood.
As they were doing the arterial side, Khalpey said, Cunningham crashed and CPR was needed once more. The medication increased even further. After 20 minutes, he said, everything was sewn up and secured.
Cunningham soon moved his legs.
And that wasn’t the end of the beating his heart took just to keep him alive. Cunningham’s heart was still enlarged, so doctors had to come up with unique techniques. Like cutting open a hole in his heart to suck out excess blood. According to the Daily Star, Cunningham is only the third person worldwide to have gone through such a procedure.
At the press conference, Cunningham thanked the doctors who saved his life...
... and his doctors thanked him for inspiring them.
