Full Transcript Of What Happened Yesterday Regarding BJ Thompson's Cardiac Arrest Per Head Trainer Rick Burkholder
BJ Thompson DL for the KC chiefs had a seizure during the (team) meeting and then eventually went into cardiac arrest. Just as a side note here, the NFL mandates that we do these emergency action plans for every team in the league; home, away, in your practice facilities, and then we are mandated to practice multiple times a year. Ironically, we practiced Monday with a group called Walters Incorporated who comes in and educates us and goes through scenarios like we went through yesterday.
With BJ, when he had the seizure, (Harrison) Butker immediately ran towards the training room and grabbed Julie Frymyer and David Glover, and then grabbed me. We went into the room, and eventually Tiffany Morton and Evan Craft came in as well. With this facility, we have a doctor's office down the hall, and Dr. JP Darsh from Kansas University came up and assisted. As a team, we tried to stabilize BJ and put him on the floor while he was still seizing. Then he went into cardiac arrest. Our team of that group of people provided CPR for him, he had one AED shock and came back, so he was only in cardiac arrest for less than a minute - a minute and a half. Our players, our security staff, everybody involved, coaches and staff, they were phenomenal in handling the crisis.
We then turned him over to the KC Fire Department and those paramedics do those practice sessions with us, so there was some familiarity with those guys. He was taken to KU hospital where he was heavily sedated yesterday through the night. Then they brought him out of sedation this morning, he was on a ventilator overnight just so he could breathe because he was so heavily sedated. That is all out. He's alert, he's awake. He's coming through quite well. We don't have a diagnosis and in medicine sometimes you don't have that. And then, like I said, he's awake and he's alert, and he's headed in the absolute right direction, so all things good in a little bit of a hairy situation but I thank you for your attention."