BUFFALO, New York – Pro tennis player Jessica Pegula has announced that her mother, co-owner and president of Buffalo Bills and Buffalo Sabers, Kim Pegula, suffered cardiac arrest in June and is still recovering while battling significant speech and memory problems has.
In an essay that The Players’ Stand published on Tuesday, Jessica Pegula described for the first time the medical crisis that abruptly removed her mother from the public eye and hinted that her mother may not resume the same level of involvement in the family’s sports franchises.
Kim Pegula, she wrote, went into cardiac arrest in her sleep and received life-saving CPR from another daughter until paramedics arrived and restored her heartbeat. The family previously said only that Kim Pegula received medical attention for “some unexpected health problems” that arose shortly after her 53rd birthday.
“My mom is working hard on her recovery, she’s improving, but where she ends up is still unknown,” wrote Jessica Pegula, 28.
She said she decided to write about her mother’s ordeal after Bill’s players Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest on the field during a Jan. 2 game in Cincinnati in what Pegula described as “a bizarre, screwed-up, full-circle moment.”
“My stomach sank because it felt the same way all over again. I was on the bench at a tennis tournament in Sydney, Australia. I wanted to throw up,” wrote Jessica Pegula, who is ranked No. 4 in the WTA singles rankings. “I was supposed to continue in mixed doubles in 15 minutes and I remember saying to one of my teammates, ‘I just freaked out a bit, this is too close to home and I feel like I’m going to panic Attack.'”
As Hamlin began his recovery, Jessica Pegula joined a wave of support from fans and the NFL wore a white screen-printed patch with Hamlin’s uniform number while playing at the Australian Open. “It didn’t feel like it was just for him, it also felt like it was for my mom,” she said.
Jessica Pegula had been at home in Florida months earlier when she received a call from her sister Kelly around midnight on her mother’s birthday and was told her mother was being taken to the hospital.
“My mom was asleep when my dad woke up when she went into cardiac arrest and she was unresponsive for quite a while,” she wrote. Kelly Pegula, who was staying with her parents, performed CPR just three months after telling her family she plans to get certified for the procedure for a job.
“I remember her telling us what she was doing in our family group chat,” Jessica Pegula wrote, “and my mom even replied, ‘Nice Kells! Now if we have a heart attack, you can revive us.’”
Today, Kim Pegula “can read, write and understand fairly well, but has trouble finding the right words to reply,” wrote Jessica Pegula. “It’s hard to deal with and it takes a lot of patience to communicate with her, but I thank God every day that we can still communicate with her at all. Doctors remain blown away by her recovery considering where it started, and her determination is the driving force behind it.”
As the first woman to serve as president of both an NHL and NFL team, Kim Pegula “lived it and loved it, and everyone she met felt it,” Jessica Pegula wrote. “Now we come to the realization that all of that is most likely gone, that she can’t be that person anymore.”
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