“Hey, miracles still happen,” were the words of a former Chicago Bears quarterback after he survived what was the most horrific incident of his life. What was worse was the fact that his wife was among the people witnessing his medical emergency live, being nine and a half months pregnant herself.

“We get to the line of scrimmage when suddenly I start feeling off. I wonder if I didn’t eat enough or if it was just too hot,” former NFL QB Connor Shaw told People. “I got dizzy and couldn’t hear myself speak, and then my vision started to fade. I felt like with every heartbeat, my eyes were closing.”

The now-35-year-old Shaw was coaching his then-eight-year-old son (now nine) Decker’s team in Fall 2025, who played flag football in a league where the coaches could play as quarterbacks. But as his eyes were feeling heavier, he walked to the sidelines and asked one of his assistant coaches to take over. But then the unthinkable happened: he collapsed in front of his family, including his wife, Molly Shaw, who was then pregnant with Shephard, and Mila (now 12) and Cutler (now 3).

Seeing all of this, Simpsonville Fire Department training officer Caleb Carter, who was coaching on the very next field, rushed to help him. Carter immediately knew what was going on.

Shaw suffered a sudden cardiac arrest due to ventricular fibrillation, which is an abnormal heart rhythm causing the heart to not beat normally, resulting in the heart not pumping blood to provide oxygen. Carter began to perform CPR compressions with an off-duty police officer for “five minutes” while others went to the Simpsonville Fire Department, which was just “adjacent to the park, to grab an automated external defibrillator (AED), which is used to restart the heart to pump blood again.

Caleb “ripped open” Shaw’s shirt to place the AED pads on his chest, after which he was sent to Prisma Health Greenville Memorial Hospital, where he was “in the trauma unit for an hour, then the ICU for an hour on a ventilator.”

But going through it all was his wife, Molly, whom he started dating through college, and was a lab partner with in human anatomy and physiology during high school.

“I remember waking up, looking at Molly, and asking her a really important question: ‘Am I out of the woods?’ She looked at me and was like, ‘Yes, Connor, you’re out of the woods.’ Molly has always given me peace of mind. As I recovered, she encouraged me and gave me confidence. She told me everything would be alright,” Shaw said.

The doctors told him that he’d need an extravascular internal cardioverter defibrillator (EV-ICD) to support his heart, which at first made Shaw uncomfortable, thinking that there was “no chance” of him putting it on his body.

“But this EV-ICD, made by Medtronic, sits underneath my left armpit. The lead does not go into the vessels; it goes up underneath my sternum, and it sits there to monitor the electrical pulses going to my heart. So if I had any sort of arrhythmia, it would send the electrical pulse, and if I were to go into V-Fib again, it is a defibrillator, so it would shock me,” Shaw explained the working of the device.

Shaw celebrated his 34th birthday in the hospital with a lap around the unit alongside Molly, then was released the next day.

Shaw was an NFL QB who played only one game in the league in 2014 with the Cleveland Browns, which the team lost 20-10 to the Baltimore Ravens. He was also part of the Bears roster after the Bears claimed him off waivers on July 1, 2016, and was re-signed in March 2017 after performing well in the preseason, with a 132 passer rating.

Shaw continued working, joining Columbia-based benefits company Colonial Life as a sales representative, and also became the Director of Player Development for the Gamecock football program.

But nothing affected his life as this incident did, and this was when Shaw thought of doing something meaningful for humanity.

Connor Shaw took a step ahead to save more lives

After the incident, Shaw was running through a range of emotions, asking multiple questions like, “I’ve never had any red flags. So how did this happen? Why is this happening? Where do we go from here?”

These questions led him to think of how lucky he was, seeing his newborn son, who was born just six weeks after his injury, and being able to make memories with him that he once thought weren’t possible anymore. This rollercoaster of emotions is what led him to start a non-profit foundation, HRTHUDL.

“One of our major initiatives is putting AEDs in areas of need, like parks and recreation fields. We’re also teaching hands-on CPR. Caleb spearheads CPR instruction around the state,” he stated.

The severity of a sudden cardiac arrest is not to be taken lightly, because it has a survival rate of below 10% when it happens outdoors, and that is what Shaw took seriously, thinking, “Everybody should have the same chance of survival that I had to be greeted by their loved ones.”

He and his wife, Molly, along with their three kids, now live peacefully while continuing to work to aid people in need.