Eagles Head Trainer Rick Burkholder met the media this afternoon to discuss the events of the morning practice, which saw Mike Patterson collapse on the field with a seizure and be taken to the hospital via ambulance. Below is his opening statement and after the jump is full text of the press conference. I figured since basically every thing he said was important and every question is one I would have asked, it makes sense to just present this transcript in it's entirety.
"As you saw, that's not a normal situation for us. However, from a medical standpoint, we handled it as if it were a normal situation because we're trained to do that. Mike Patterson had a seizure at practice. I have an emergency room doctor with me at all times up here, Dr. [Jeremy] Ng, and he worked with Chris Peduzzi, my assistant, and myself to stabilize Mike early on in the situation. Once we had the situation stabilized, we started an IV on him. We had the medication available on the field because I have a doctor here. It did not require any medication. Then, we had the paramedics take over to spine board him just in case it was trama induced and we put him in the ambulance. He is at Lehigh Valley Hospital right now. He's absolutely alert, stable, totally communicating with everybody to the point where he's joking a little bit. We won't speculate what happened to him other than he had a seizure, and they'll do all the testing at Lehigh Valley Hospital to determine why he had the seizure. That'll start with a CT scan of his head, and they'll work down from there. Then, we'll give you updates as we go. Dr. Ng was in charge of the situation and acted flawlessly. Chris Peduzzi had the head, and along with Dr. Ng stabilized his airway. Basically, he didn't have any complications from the seizure. Chris is with him now and Mike assures all of us through a text message from Chris that he is cool, and we're hoping for the best and we'll give you an update."
On whether Mike has a history of seizures:
"We have no history on Mike medically that would tip us off to anything."
On what kind of medical emergency occurred:
"There's different levels of seizures, and the body goes into involuntary contractions, loses consciousness, don't have control of their extremities. That's the outward signs of it. It could be anything, we don't even want to speculate what might have happened to him. I'll tell you this: he was in the drill, and then he walked down into the individual period and he was talking to everybody. There was about four or five minutes there where he wasn't doing anything and then he just had the seizure. The seizure last right around on four minutes our watches.
On whether a seizure could be a result of dehydration:
"Oh, it can. We are not going to speculate that's what it is, but you can have a seizure due to dehydration."
On whether he lost consciousness:
"For all intensive purposes, he couldn't communicate. His eyes were open but he wasn't alert, so technically he lost consciousness."
On whether this is more likely to occur on a hot day:
"I don't want to speculate that it's heat, but I've sat up here before and talked about dehydration. That's an ongoing event, day after day, your tank can empty slowly and it can catch up to you. I'm sure there is documented cases of dehydration and seizures, but we're not going to speculate right now. They're going to do the tests and we'll give you an update as to what happens."
On whether this incident is similar to DE Chris Clemons incident a couple years ago:
"Similar, but Chris Clemons didn't have a seizure. He just had dehydration and a heat illness problem. Two really separate things. A lot of people think they're intertwined and I guess they're closely related but you can be dehydrated and not have heat illness, and you can have heat illness and not be dehydrated. We're trying to determine all that with Mike and we did that with Chris as well."
On whether Mike Patterson went down before individual drills took place:
"No. He had been practicing for about an hour. They were about to start one-on-one's."