They won’t know it for a few years, but Gainesville’s smallest new citizens got a taste of football on Super Bowl Sunday.
“Celebrating a little game day fun with our tiniest teammates,” says a Facebook posting by Northeast Georgia Medical Center Gainesville. “These NICU babies may be small, but their strength, determination and fighting spirit could outshine any team on the field.”
And one person who commented correctly observed that one of the players on the winning Seattle Hawks Sunday night, Derreck Hall, was, himself, a preemie, which an Internet search confirmed.
Hall, according to Wikipedia, was born in Gulfport, Miss., four months premature, and was dead at birth without a heartbeat before being resuscitated. Weighing just 2 pounds and 1 ounce at birth, with brain bleeding, he spent a week on life support.
Believing that he would likely be a in a permanent vegetative state, doctors advised his mother, Stacy Gooden-Crandle, to allow life support to be discontinued, but she refused. Hall would spend five months in the NICU on a ventilator before finally going home with his family. In his early years he would be frequently hospitalized and suffered from asthma.
Hall has grown into a 254-pound linebacker for the Super Bowl champs.
