Kirk Herbstreit reveals the latest on son Zak's medical setback, ongoing 'issues with his heart'

ESPN college football analyst and broadcast Kirk Herbstreit provided some more insight into his son Zak’s ongoing health issues on Thursday, joining the “Pat McAfee Show” and discussing his last week. Zak was hospitalized late last week with a heart issue of some nature.

Speaking to Pat McAfee and co-host A.J. Hawk, Herbstreit shared that his son still has a long road to recovery, but that he is in good spirits. He was discharged from the hospital Wednesday and is now at home being cared for by his family.

“He’s in good spirits, he’s home with us where his mom can take really good care of him. And this is just going to be a long process to kind of see how his heart responds to some of the medications that he’s on,” Herbstreit said. “This is like a three or four month kind of thing, to kind of see how it recovers. But the key is being patient and positive and you know, getting a little — we just got back from a walk, right before I came on with you guys we took our dogs for a walk. But little walks, like down the street and back. So yeah, this came out of nowhere, man.”

Herbstreit also reiterated that Zak being discharged from the hospital does not mean he’s out of the woods by any measure.

It is, however, a step in the right direction after what Herbstreit described as a “setback.”

“But we had a setback with Zak with his health this past Friday. So really the last five or six days have been kind of a whirlwind of he’s been in the hospital and with some issues with his heart. And we’ve just been trying to kind of keep up with that. We brought him home yesterday, which is great. But normally you get out of the hospital and you’re cured and everything’s good,” Herbstreit said.

Herbstreit went on to explain that Zak underwent an echocardiogram. Similar to an ultrasound, the echocardiogram uses high frequency radio waves to do imaging of the heart. It can depict blood flow in and out of chambers, give a sense of the pressures being put on the muscle and give a relative sense of the size of the heart.

It convinced Herbstreit that more people competing in higher-level athletics should be getting an echocardiogram to learn if there are otherwise unforeseen risks or health concerns from playing their sport.

“And I talked to Ryan Day about it the other day, college, I don’t know if they do that in the NFL, I really would encourage anybody who’s playing sports to go a little bit more than just doing your normal physical. Or even EKG wiring, that’s not really enough. The echo is what you really need to discover some things that potentially can be scary,” Herbstreit said.

Mostly, Herbstreit is happy that the doctors and the rest of Zak’s care team seem to be on the right track in treating the heart issue.

“We’re very fortunate that he got the echo and they found some stuff. He was originally diagnosed with pneumonia, because they thought he had some fluid in his lungs. But that turned out not to be the case at all. But he had very few symptoms. You would never know that he’s dealing with what he’s dealing with,” Herbstreit said.