Dr. Sanjay Gupta said it came out of nowhere.

Several days after he performed brain surgery on Dan Snyder, he said Snyder's head injuries were "very stable." Gupta recalled looking at an MRI of Snyder's brain a few days after the surgery.

"In his case, he had a depressed skull fracture," he said. "He did not have a big blood clot and I thought that was all favorable."

Gupta juggles several jobs. He is a medical correspondent for CNN and Time magazine. He was an embedded reporter during the war in Iraq. And he still practices medicine.

He operates on Mondays at Grady Hospital and covers days there once every two weeks. He happened to be making rounds at Grady on the day Dan Snyder died.

He said he heard that something was wrong with Snyder, that something had changed. It was an infection that proved fatal.

"You really tell the true character of a person by the way they react under pressure," Gupta said. "I'll never forget with LuAnn. I walked in the room right after I found out Dan had died. I didn't know what to say. She just looked at me and gave me a huge hug. She said, 'I know this is hard for you, too. You did a wonderful job on Danny.' What presence of mind to even think of that, let alone say that."

Since then, he has kept in touch with LuAnn Snyder. The Snyders created the Dan Snyder Neuro-Trauma Fund at Emory University Hospital with a $25,000 donation and will visit Atlanta for a ceremony later in the fall. In addition, the fund has received another $25,000 in private donations and the Thrashers have pledged for the next five years to give $15,000 in the name of the winner of the team's Dan Snyder Award, which was defenseman Garnet Exelby this year. The fund is dedicated to teaching, research and clinical care in neuro-trauma.

For Gupta, part of being a doctor is having patients who don't make it.

"It's always tough," he said. "I don't think you ever get used to that sort of thing. I don't relish having to tell families of patients who are often ones who are young and healthy except for injury-wise. People are not expecting it in the way that they would if someone had a long illness."