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BJ Thompson of the Kansas City Chiefs is awake and alert after a seizure

Theo

Kansas City Chiefs defensive end BJ Thompson is awake and responsive a day after suffering an epileptic seizure and cardiac arrest at the team’s practice facility.

“He’s alert. He’s awake. He’s coming through it just fine,” Rick Burkholder, the Chiefs’ vice president of sports medicine and performance, told reporters Friday. “We don’t have a diagnosis, and in medicine sometimes you don’t have that. He’s awake and alert and he’s absolutely on the right track.”

The Chiefs drafted Thompson in the fifth round out of Stephen F. Austin in 2023 and he made two tackles last season.

Burkholder said the 25-year-old had an epileptic seizure during a special teams meeting and kicker Harrison Butker ran to the trainer’s room to alert two assistant coaches. Burkholder joined them, as did two other trainers and later Jean-Philippe Darche of the Kansas Health Sports Medicine and Performance Center, which is adjacent to the practice facility.

“As a team, we tried to stabilize BJ and then put him on the ground while he was still having a seizure, and then he went into cardiac arrest,” Burkholder said. “Our team from that group did CPR. He got an AED shock and came to, so his cardiac arrest only lasted less than a minute, a minute and a half. Our players, security, coaches – they handled the crisis phenomenally.”

The NFL requires teams to practice emergency procedures, and Burkholder said his team did so as recently as Monday. After performing CPR on Thursday, they turned Thompson over to the Kansas City Fire Department, he said.

Burkholder said Thompson was then taken to a hospital where he was heavily sedated overnight and placed on a ventilator to help him breathe in that condition. He was taken out of sedation and taken off the ventilator on Friday.

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