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The original was posted on /r/soccer by /u/Sparky-moon on 2026-04-08 14:53:33+00:00.
Original Title: Edoardo Bove on suffering a cardiac arrest and returning to football: 'I’m so lucky it happened at a perfect age. I was 22. I was mature enough to understand the real meaning, but I also had the energy and power of a young guy."
“I started a new life,” he says of the cardiac arrest that nearly killed him in December 2024. “I don’t regret anything because it made me stronger. I’ve never been scared about dying.”
“The last thing I remember is when I went down. I woke up in hospital without knowing what happened. I thought I’d been in a car accident.”
“Before it happened, I felt like a superhero. They told me I wouldn’t play football again. Sometimes I was thinking, “what am I going to do?”. There were very difficult days where everything was going so bad.”
“It was hard but it became part of the journey. I’m happy with how it went and I learned more in this year than from anything I’d experienced before.”
His life has changed indelibly and he lives with an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) fitted into his upper chest. It checks his heart rhythm and will deliver him electric pulses if it detects an abnormality. Serie A bans such devices, so he had to leave his homeland.
“Here, I show you.” Bove lifts up his black compression shirt, reveals a scar several centimetres long on his side, and smiles tenderly. “I got a new friend in my body.”
“The first month, you struggle sleeping on the side. It changes your physique. When you see yourself changed in the mirror it can be painful - but for me it wasn’t. I’ve never been disappointed.”
'I’m so lucky it happened at a perfect age. I was 22. I was mature enough to understand the real meaning, but I also had the energy and power of a young guy.”