Having shaken hands with the Grim Reaper himself, off-duty Durham Regional Police Const. John Cadorin was quick to spring into action when a 68-year-old man collapsed on an Ajax soccer field recently.
Cadorin had been playing on the opposing team during a recreational soccer game on June 3 when another player wobbled, stumbled and fell to the ground.
"You could tell he was in distress - he was having a hard time breathing,'' said Cadorin, 48, who'd suffered a heart attack two years ago and was saved by his wife doing CPR.
Cadorin immediately started doing CPR on the man, while someone called an ambulance and paramedics.
"It's a little difficult to explain, but when I started doing CPR ... I could see myself there ... I was thinking about his poor family,'' he said.
"A couple of times, he came back. But I kept losing him, his whole body was shutting down and he was turning blue. His vital signs were absent,'' said Cadorin, who's been a police officer for 23 years and had never needed to give CPR before, on or off duty.
At one point, another person also helped with mouth-to-mouth breathing.
Paramedics were on the scene quickly and the man was taken to hospital, where he regained consciousness. Efforts from Cadorin and the paramedics are credited with helping to save his life. The man has since been released from hospital.
"I'm happy for him. I'm glad to know he's better... He was able to come back from the dead,'' Cadorin said. "If he loves soccer like I do, I'll probably see him again on the soccer field."
Cadorin doesn't remember too much about his own brush with death. Always fit and healthy, he'd come back from a run one day and collapsed in his garage, where his wife, who had CPR training, found him a couple of minutes later and called an ambulance. When she found him, his vital signs were absent, but she was able to revive him with CPR.
"My wife kept me alive,'' Cadorin said. On the way to hospital, his vital signs disappeared again, and he was later told he was "dead for three minutes.'' But again he was revived. Eventually, he had triple bypass surgery.
He doesn't remember anything between the run and waking up four days later. He'd been put into a medically induced coma for healing and "they packed me in ice for four days.'' Doctors weren't sure if he would have brain damage or not.
But aside from scars and some heart damage, Cadorin is fine. He went back to work four months after his heart attack. Doctors say there may be some genetic reason behind what happened, but it wasn't lifestyle related.
Lots of people have asked if he saw a "white light'' during his experience or if it's made him more religious. The answer is "no'' to both.
"Even to this day I'm still trying to understand it... I guess I was just not meant to die,'' he says. Cadorin says he still plays soccer, lives a healthy lifestyle and is on the alert for chest pains, but that doesn't dominate his life.
"If you live in fear, you really can't live,'' he says.
Copyright 2012 Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
