CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Omar Carter wasn’t watching Monday night’s NFL game live. But his twin brother Lamar had tuned in to the game from out of state, and so the two were trading occasional text messages about what was going on.
“Then my brother went radio silent, which is unlike him,” Carter said Tuesday in a phone interview.
Omar Carter — now a 34-year-old accountant in Charlotte who once played basketball at Appalachian State and Charlotte Christian — wondered why.
Curious, Carter went online. There he saw the video of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsing in the first quarter after making a tackle against the Cincinnati Bengals. He didn’t wonder anymore about the radio silence. His brother was just trying to protect him from the old memories.
“I saw that video,” Carter said, “and I knew exactly what had happened. Because it happened to me too.”
Hamlin’s catastrophic injury Monday stopped the entire NFL world cold. The Bills-Bengals game was postponed in the first quarter and won’t be resumed this week — and perhaps not ever — because of one of the scariest injuries ever in a pro football game.
As the Bills wrote on their official Twitter account: “Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest following a hit in our game versus the Bengals. His heartbeat was restored on the field and he was transferred to the UC Medical Center for further testing and treatment. He is currently sedated and listed in critical condition.”
Omar Carter knows better than almost anyone in the world what Hamlin is going through right now, because Carter also had a sudden cardiac arrest incident while playing sports. Like Hamlin, Carter said: “We both had an incident where we pretty much died.”
And he’s got some advice for Hamlin once he recovers, too, which we will get to later.
In Carter’s case, the sport he loved was basketball. In 2013, he was playing in a summer pro-am league in Charlotte when he collapsed.
Carter wasn’t hit before he fell. He simply threw a pass for a layup on a 2-on-1 fast break, then started to backpedal to play defense. But the video of Carter’s backward fall as he backpedaled and Hamlin’s fall Monday night after he got hit in the chest while making a tackle are eerily similar.
“The way he dropped,” Carter said of Hamlin, “It made me think of mine. I kind of remember the feeling at the time: ‘Something’s not right.’ And then I fell, and I don’t remember much of anything after that.”
Carter was 25 years old at that time. Hamlin is 24. They were both in excellent shape.
By then Carter had finished his playing career at Appalachian State, where he was a prolific scorer, and had gone to play professionally in Brazil. He was back in Charlotte for the summer. He had dreams of playing well enough in South America that he would eventually get to join his close friend Steph Curry — whom he had teamed with both in high school and on various youth AAU teams — in the NBA.
But his basketball dreams ended for Carter that night, although he didn’t know that at the time.
In many ways, Carter’s cardiac arrest in 2013 shaped his life. A cardiac nurse named Kelly Thomas was in the stands that night at Grady Cole Center in Charlotte and saved Carter from dying, administering CPR immediately and also using an AED (automated external defibrillator) that was nearby to shock his heart.
“My heart stopped for 13 minutes while CPR was being administered,” Carter said. “I was shocked three times.”
Details of exactly how Hamlin was treated Monday are unclear, but medical professionals administered CPR to him on the field, according to ESPN, which was broadcasting the game. He was also given oxygen. An ambulance drove onto the field and took him to the hospital.
Carter was lucky. He has made a full recovery, with the help of a defibrillator implanted into his chest. Others who have suffered life-or-death situations on playing fields haven’t been as lucky.
In 2005, former Carolina Panther Al Lucas was involved in a collision on a kickoff return with an opposing player at an Arena Football League game in Los Angeles. Lucas had played in 20 games for the Panthers as a reserve defensive lineman in 2000 and 2001 and was trying to make it back to the NFL. He was taken to a California hospital and died the same day, the victim of a spinal cord injury. Lucas was 26.
Carter is married now and will earn his MBA from Queens University of Charlotte in April. Besides his accounting work, he has just started a home health-care business.
“I like to stay busy,” Carter said.
Most important to him is The Omar Carter Foundation, now in its ninth year of existence. Its mission is to teach CPR and AED awareness to the community. It has partnerships with various organizations and colleges and has already taught tens of thousands of people about the life-giving gift of CPR.
So he has a life worth living, and he has made peace with what happened to him. But again, as Carter said, “I’m 10 years into this.”
Hamlin, on the other hand, is barely 10 hours into this. His family is only beginning to live the nightmare that Carter’s did for months. Like millions, Carter said he is praying for Hamlin’s recovery.
I asked Carter what advice he would like to give Hamlin in a few weeks, once the initial shock is gone and the reality of life after sudden cardiac arrest is apparent.
“First of all, I would say to him just take the moment, breathe and recognize that this happened,” Carter said. “I would advise him to learn everything he can about what exactly did happen. You need all the information you can get. And you just need to know this is not going to be an overnight thing. It’s not going to be a month, or even a couple of months. It may not even be a year. Everyone’s recovery is different. ... For me, counseling helped, even though it took a few years for me to get it.
“And if you start talking about it, and you just break down and cry?” Carter continued. “That is normal. Go at your own pace. Lean on the people who love you. This is not anybody else’s story. It’s yours.”
