WORLD NEWS – FRANCE: Rasmus Dahlin is opening up about his fiancée Carolina Matavac’s traumatic medical emergency during a summer vacation in the south of France. The 25-year-old suffered sudden major heart failure that rapidly escalated into a life-or-death situation, and Dahlin addressed the Buffalo Sabres community in a letter detailing the crisis and its aftermath.
While on vacation, Matavac felt ill for several days before collapsing into severe cardiac failure. She received CPR on multiple occasions, sometimes for extended periods lasting up to a couple of hours at a time, interventions that Dahlin says ultimately kept her alive. First responders and hospital staff stabilized her before she was transferred to the hospital and kept on life support for weeks.
Her survival culminated in a dramatic heart transplant, a surgical transplantation that gave her a new organ and a second chance at life. The account emphasizes the centrality of the heart transplant to her survival: without repeated CPR and advanced hospital care, the outcome could have been unimaginable. Medical teams in the south of France carried out weeks of critical care and then the transplant procedure itself.
Dahlin’s letter to the Buffalo Sabres community lays bare the terror and the medical heroism behind this emergency, spotlighting the life-saving role of bystanders, emergency responders and transplant teams. The story underscores the devastating speed of cardiac collapse and the vital importance of rapid CPR, specialist care and organ transplantation in turning a near-tragedy into a chance for recovery.
The timeline extended from early sickness through multiple rounds of CPR to transfer, weeks on life support and then the transplant, an intense chain of interventions performed while the couple was abroad. Dahlin highlighted the transplant as the turning point that preserved Matavac’s life and the razor-thin margin that separated survival from the worst outcome.
