The tragic end of Raphael Dwamena - who died after collapsing suddenly on the field when his heart betrayed him - could have been avoided if the 28-year-old Ghanaian striker from Egnatia Rrogozhine, a team in the Albanian Serie A, hadn't decided a year ago to remove the subcutaneous defibrillator implanted in 2020 from his chest. Dwamena had been diagnosed with a malignant arrhythmia, had already collapsed twice while playing, and the defibrillator had saved his life. Still, according to him, the device was the cause of his problems, so he made a decision that turned out to be fatal.
The striker's problems began in 2017 after he had stood out with goals for Zurich in the first half of the year (12 goals in 18 matches, leading the team to promotion to the Swiss top tier). Dwamena was purchased by Brighton that summer, a deal subject to medical examinations, not passed due to the discovery of his heart problem. A problem not identified in Switzerland, and indeed, the player continued for a season with Zurich. "For us, he is a suitable player," said Thomas Bickel, the sports director of the Swiss club at the time.
Even for Levante, which brought him to Spain in 2018, paying 7 million for his registration, there were no anomalies in Dwamena's heart. It was only a year later, when the striker was loaned to Zaragoza, that evidently more thorough exams revealed the player's heart problems. It was October 2019: doctors advised him to retire immediately from football due to a structural heart disease that causes a propensity to develop malignant ventricular arrhythmias, which usually occur especially during moments of maximum effort.
The only alternative to retirement was: "We will let you play only if you put an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator under your skin," they told him. And so it was: the procedure was performed in January 2020 at the Miguel Servet Hospital in Zaragoza, with the insertion of an ICD (an Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator, the same device placed in Eriksen's chest after his collapse at the Euros two years ago), allowing him to resume training in the spring of that year.
But why did Dwamena decide to remove the subcutaneous defibrillator? The player explained last year to Neue Zürcher Zeitung that after the operation, he had suffered two collapses on the field, allegedly caused by the defibrillator itself: one in Zaragoza and another at Blau Weiss Linz, a team in the Austrian second division where he had moved for the 2021-22 season. And so, even though he had been told that it was the ICD that had actually saved him, he became convinced that the device was the cause of his problems and decided to remove it with a complex, almost unprecedented operation in medicine: removing an implanted defibrillator necessary, without putting anything in its place.
After the operation, carried out last year in Zurich, Dwamena had to sign a document when he was discharged from the clinic, waiving the doctors from any risk, even death, that could be caused by a future cardiac episode. The striker did not want to hear reasons to remove the defibrillator, ignoring the pleas of his family, friends, or his agent Philipp Degen. Deeply religious, the Ghanaian argued his decision: "I have been visited by many doctors; they all say something different. I respect their opinions, diagnoses. But I don't take them seriously; sometimes I laugh. Only one can tell me when it's time to stop: the Lord."
But Dwamena also wanted to continue playing, even though those close to him begged him not to. Behind this decision to move forward was also the desire to help those same people who depended on his football income: "He had a very large family to support, and he never wanted to stop playing," emphasizes those who knew him well from his time in Spain.
After the operation in January of last year, Dwamena had to face a long recovery once again. And despite his loved ones, as well as the doctors, asking him not to return to a football field, he started training and playing with BSC Old Boys, a team in the fifth division of Switzerland, for a fee ranging from 200 to 400 euros per month. Raphael had then decided to retire if no other team had come forward to offer him a contract, but Egnatia appeared in January 2023, and Dwamena started scoring a lot with the Albanian team, leading them to the current top position in the standings, with 9 goals scored in 10 matches. Until his heart betrayed him once again: but there was no defibrillator to save him.
By Paolo Fiorenza for fanpage.it