As the former Liverpool manager Bill
Shankly famously said – ‘some people
believe football is a matter of life and death
– I can assure you it is much, much more
important than that’.
And for one Italian boy who was trapped
underwater for a scarcely-believable 42
minutes, that was exactly the case.
The 14-year-old – identified only as
‘Michael’ by Italian media – is said to have
jumped off a bridge with friends into water
that was just 6.5ft deep, and failed to come
back to the surface.
Emergency services required almost three
quarters of an hour to rescue the boy,
forming a human chain to drag him from the
riverbed.
Michael’s heart had unsurprisingly stopped
beating until it was restarted with a
defibrillator, and he was attached to a life
support machine at San Raffaele hosptial
and put in an induced coma to help his
organs recover.
Incredibly, the boy woke after a month, and
showed that he has his priorities in order by
asking whether his team Juventus were still
in the Champions League.
‘The first thing he said was ‘ciao’ to his
parents and asked whether Juventus, his
team, was still in the Champions League,’
his doctor Alberto Zangrillo said.
‘He remembers everything and appears to
have no brain damage.’
Zangrillo’s team used revolutionary
techniques to warm the boy’s blood and
oxygenate it outside of his body, before
pumping it back in to keep him alive.
‘It’s the greatest satisfaction of my entire
professional career,’ said Zangrillo of the
whole operation.
Hopefully, Juventus can give him something
to cheer about in the Champions League
final against Barcelona this Saturday…
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