Football
Dan Kilpatrick, Tottenham Correspondent 8y

David Ginola improving after undergoing quadruple heart bypass

Former Tottenham Hotspur and Paris Saint-Germain winger David Ginola has "regained his faculties" and is upbeat after undergoing a quadruple heart bypass, according to a friend who visited him in hospital on Sunday.

Ginola suffered a cardiac arrest while playing football in the south of France on Thursday.

The 49-year-old, who also played for Newcastle, Aston Villa and Everton, had to have his heart restarted and underwent surgery in Monaco on the same day.

"He's very well. I saw him Sunday, he regained his faculties," Jean-Stephan Camerini told L'Equipe. "I had the pleasure to see him smiling. He's fine, at least as someone who has undergone an operation of more than four hours can be."

Speaking after the operation, and with the authority of Ginola's family, his surgeon said the 1998-99 PFA Players' Player of the Year and Football Writers' Association Footballer of the Year could not have been luckier.

"I made the decision to transfer him to the operating theatre and he immediately underwent a quadruple heart bypass, which was very straightforward although difficult," Gilles Dreyfus, professor of cardiac surgery at the Monaco Heart Centre, told the BBC on Friday.

"This morning he woke up perfectly normally with no neurological damage and is now recovering from a bypass like anybody would normally do.

"It was a sequence of events that at every stage went absolutely fine, that is why he is here today. Luckier you can't be. It's an unbelievable story."

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