For Timothy O’Donnell, hours of denial gave way in the emergency room of a South Florida hospital late on the night of March 13, 2021, when the trauma care specialist called the resuscitation team and told it to stay close.
“I was thinking, ‘Oh, man, are you going to die right here?’” O’Donnell, a triathlon champion and one of the world’s fittest men, recalled of that terrifying day a little more than 13 months ago. “That’s where the mind-set of the athlete kicked in. Just put negativity out of the mind and focus on surviving.”
And yet, hours earlier, that mind-set had nearly cost him his life.