Jessica Pegula has played some of her best tennis while coping with family trauma.
In a poignant first-person piece for The Players’ Tribune titled I Want to Talk to You About My Mom, Pegula details her mother’s continuing recovery after going into cardiac arrest last summer.
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World No. 4 Pegula shares the story of her sister saving the life of their mother, Kim Pegula, who went into cardiac arrest last June while asleep at home.
Kelly Pegula, Jessica Pegula’s sister, performed CPR on Kim Pegula until the ambulance arrived, saving her mother’s life.
The 28-year-old Buffalo native decided to publicly share her family’s story after seeing Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffer cardiac arrest on a nationally-televised NFL game.
Terry Pegula and Kim Pegula, Jessica’s parents, are the owners of the NFL’s Buffalo Bills and the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres. Kim Pegula served as president of both the Bills and Sabres.
During the Australian Open, the then third-ranked American wore a No. 3 patch on her shirt to honor both Hamlin and her mother.
While Kim Pegula was in intensive care the entire family took turns staying by her bedside around the clock.
“The most frustrating thing about these types of injuries is that the outcome is unknown. Experts base it on how long the brain was without oxygen, and how one responds to commands at the earliest stages, but it is very difficult,” Jessica Pegula writes for The Players’ Tribune. “It was a waiting game. We lived in that hospital for basically two weeks. We took shifts, we brought each other food, we knew all the nurses and doctors, we even knew their schedules.
“We had to force my dad to go home and sleep, but most of the time he didn’t. He would go sit in his car to get away or come to my house. He didn’t want to go back to their house unless my mom was back with him. When they say one day in the hospital equals a week to recover, that is no joke.”
After about a week, Kim Pegula was moved out of the intensive care unit. These days, Jessica Pegula says her mom is continuing to work hard in rehab though it’s uncertain where she will eventually wind-up in her recovery.
“Today, my mom is still in recovery and although it is the same answer every time someone asks me, it is true, she is improving every day,” Jessica Pegula writes. “She is dealing with significant expressive aphasia and significant memory issues.
“She can read, write, and understand pretty well, but she has…
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