EVERETT – Here’s the question that has bothered John Cokos since the night he essentially died of cardiac arrest after playing in an adult-league hockey game, then was revived by two opposing players with emergency medical training, then underwent a quadruple bypass operation to correct four clogged arteries, and is just now, some six weeks later, getting back on his feet.
What, exactly, do you say to people who literally saved your life? What words express proper gratitude not only for yourself, but for your wife and children who still have the husband and father they nearly lost that night you were lifeless – no heartbeat, no respiration – on the ice at the Everett Events Center?
“Thanks a bunch, fellas. Buy you a beer?”
Jennifer Buchanan / The Herald
Falls a little short, doesn’t it?
Having contemplated this in the weeks since his surgery, Cokos has at last decided “there’s really no way to thank them (adequately).”
His wife, Cathy, agrees. “How do you say ‘thank you’ that much?” she asked. “There’s nothing you can really do, nothing you can really say that’s enough.”
Well, one thing you can do is call the newspaper, hoping the folks there will tell the story of the two men who surely had halos tucked inside their hockey helmets on that remarkable night.
It was Aug. 21, a Sunday. Cokos, then 36, left his Lynnwood home and drove to Everett, where his team, the Highlanders, would take on the Iceoholics in the championship game of the Greater Seattle Hockey League. It turned out to be a spirited, but friendly contest, with the Iceoholics pulling out a 2-0 victory.
One of the stars for the Iceoholics was 23-year-old goaltender Jon Perkins, who learned hockey in his native Canada before moving with his parents to the United States. The irony is that Perkins, who also lives in Lynnwood, was a substitute player that night, filling in because the Iceoholics did not have a regular goalie of their own.
After the final horn, the two teams formed facing lines at center ice for the traditional post-game handshakes. Since most of the players were acquaintances, it was all quite cordial and congratulatory. Then the Highlanders returned to their bench area, where they waited to watch the Iceoholics receive their awards.
Jennifer Buchanan / The Herald
Suddenly, there was a disturbance. Cokos, standing with his Highlanders teammates, had collapsed.
Perkins, the goalie, quickly skated over. A lifeguard and a certified emergency medical technician, or EMT, he saw that Cokos needed immediate help.
“I said, ‘People, I’m an EMT. Can I get in there?’ And they all backed away,” he recalled.
All except Robert Roach, a 48-year-old Iceoholics defenseman and heavy equipment operator from Redmond, who has also been trained in first-aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). He knelt with Perkins beside the fallen Cokos, who by this time “was turning blue and was non-responsive,” Roach said.
“He still had a heartbeat at the beginning,” Perkins said, “but then that went away.”
After sending someone to call for an aid car, the two men rolled Cokos onto his back, cut away his uniform and began their work. Perkins, still clad in his goaltender gear, started CPR – with his palm he repeatedly compressed Cokos’ chest, forcing blood from a heart no longer beating on its own – while Roach performed rescue breathing. They continued for the next few minutes until the aid car arrived.
Perkins and Roach “were as cool as they could be,” said Greg Werry, the Iceoholics captain. “Those two guys just took control.”
Once on the scene, paramedics used electric shocks from a portable defibrillator to get Cokos’ heart beating again and a bag-valve mask to regulate his breathing. He was then transported to Providence Hospital, where it was found that two arteries to his heart were completely blocked. Surgery was necessary, and when doctors opened his chest a few days later, they discovered that a third artery was 80 percent blocked and a fourth was 50 percent blocked. The result was two more bypasses, making a total of four.
All this time, going back to the moment he collapsed, Cokos was either unconscious or incoherent from medication. He remembers nothing from the moment he left home for the drive to the game (“Everybody told me I played great,” he said with a laugh) until he woke up after the operation, a span of almost four days.
Later, Cokos and his wife came to realize how indebted they were to so many people. Certainly to the surgeons and staff at Providence Hospital, and also to the paramedics. Yet all those professionals could never have done a thing if not for the prompt, capable and truly heroic efforts of Perkins and Roach in those first tenuous moments on the ice.
“When the paramedics came into John’s room at the hospital, I started to thank them,” Cathy Cokos said. “And they said, ‘Don’t thank us. All we did was drive him here. That goalie saved his life.’”
“I died,” John Cokos said, “and those two brought me back.”
Weeks later, John and Cathy Cokos say they are still absorbing all of what happened – and what nearly happened. Typically, near-death experiences do not come and go like minor traumas. They linger in the memory, often evoking various what-if possibilities. John Cokos, for example, cannot forget that Perkins was a substitute goalie. What if the Iceoholics had used another player in the nets that night? Someone who did not know CPR?
“I’d be a goner,” he said frankly.
Cathy Cokos, meanwhile, admits she is still “having a hard time with this,” she said. “Sometimes I’ll be driving down the road and I’ll be crying. And I’ll think to myself, ‘Why am I crying?’ Well, it’s because I can’t believe how close I came to losing him.”
Sometimes, too, there are brief moments of humor. A recent one had to do with their shared fear of air travel.
“My wife and I are both petrified of flying,” John Cokos said, “but now we can joke about that. We’ll say, ‘Well, I guess there’s no reason for us not to fly because I’m not meant to die right now.’”
Eventually, though, the talk turns to their children, 7-year-old Zachary and 3-month-old Alexandra. And at this point the levity stops.
“I still can’t pick my daughter up (because of his recent surgery), but I can hold her in my lap,” John Cokos said. “And I’ll sit there and I’ll look at her and think, ‘She almost never knew me.’ Yet by the grace of God, I’m still here. She still has her daddy.”
Cathy Cokos wonders if Perkins and Roach “know that we have two small kids here and what a big deal it is that they were able to save John. What they did meant so much more than just saving his life. It wasn’t just one life affected by what they did. It was all of us. Everyone’s life could have been changed that day. I could be sitting here all alone right now.”
Roach, in fact, does understand because he has two daughters of his own. Asked what it feels like to help save someone’s life, he paused for a moment.
Then he said, “I think the best thing is knowing (Cokos) can go back to his family. He gets to go back and be a dad to his kids. Being a dad is pretty important to me, so it’s nice knowing I helped give his kids the opportunity to still have him there. I think that’s the thing that makes me feel the best.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
