Roman Ruiz doesn’t remember anything from the day he died.
He doesn’t remember much of the first year after, either. He relies on a YouTube video for that.
“My brain injury really affects my memory,” Ruiz, now 27, told the Deseret News. “So, anything from the past, I don’t really remember, but I’ve heard the story.”
When Ruiz woke up the morning of March 7, 2020, he was a Division I track athlete with Olympic aspirations. Hours later, he laid unconscious on the track at Utah State University, technically dead for 35 minutes while a good Samaritan and paramedics worked to revive him.
On a late August afternoon, Ruiz sits on a white couch with his parents in the living room of their Pasco, Washington, home.
Plants of all sizes line the back of the couch, ascending like a staircase of greenery. Much like the plants behind him, Ruiz is full of life.
Over the last five and a half years, Ruiz and his family have embarked on a physically and emotionally taxing journey as they rebuilt his life, one step at a time, leaning on their Latter-day Saint faith and each other for strength.
“If there’s anything I’d want people to know it’s that God has a plan,” Ruiz told me that afternoon. “Whatever happens in your life, that’s God’s plan for your life.”
While that fateful March morning has been wiped from Ruiz’s memory, that day is still vivid for his parents — and the man who helped bring him back from the dead.
‘Something was really wrong’
“Beautiful day isn’t it?” Ruiz asked John Bailey, who had arrived at the track the morning of March 7, 2020.
Ruiz and Bailey had the track to themselves. It was spring break at Utah State, and the winter’s snow had melted just enough to reveal the track.
“Yes, it looks like you’ve had quite a workout,” Bailey said before he started his run.
Bailey had planned to ride his bike that day, but while inflating one of the tires, he accidentally popped off one of the stems and had to take it to the bike shop for repairs.
So, Bailey headed to the track to run laps instead. He had made it halfway around the track when he noticed Ruiz lying down. Assuming the young man was resting, he continued his workout.
But as Bailey got closer, he realized Ruiz was motionless.
“Something was really wrong,” Bailey told the Deseret News in September.
He ran to Ruiz and saw he wasn’t breathing. Bailey, a retired physician, began performing CPR and called 911, not knowing how long Ruiz’s brain had been starved of oxygen.
“I was confident that I was doing the procedure correctly, but you’re at the mercy of what a human body can do,” he said.
Once paramedics arrived, they took over the resuscitation efforts. Ruiz was technically dead for 35 minutes as Bailey and the paramedics tried to resuscitate him.
When the ambulance took Ruiz away, he wasn’t sure if the young man would make it.
“I didn’t know,” Bailey said. “I was only cautiously optimistic there on the track that day. I just said he either will or he won’t, and I’m just going to give him every opportunity as far as everything I can do to make sure that he has a chance to survive.”
Eight hours away in Washington, it was a typical Saturday morning for the Ruiz family. Javier Ruiz was sweeping the kitchen when his phone rang with the news that would change his family forever.
As the woman on the other line of the Utah number struggled to pronounce his son’s name, his fatherly instincts kicked in.
“I’m Roman Ruiz’s father,” he said.
His wife, Verna Ruiz, walked into the room and could sense something was wrong based on her husband’s voice. The details were few, but Javier and Verna Ruiz knew their son had collapsed. They needed to get to Utah immediately.
Within 20 minutes, the couple and their youngest son, Elijah Ruiz, were on the road — the kitchen stools still on the counter from the sweeping and the broom left leaning against the wall.
Weathering the storm
When Verna and Javier Ruiz first saw their son, he was lying in a bed in an intensive care unit in Ogden, where he had been flown by helicopter in a medically induced coma with “every imaginable machine hooked up to him,” according to his father.
“That was kind of a sight to see him just laying there with all these things in him, on him, all over,” his mother said. “That was something.”
While Verna remained unaware of the severity of her son’s condition — which she says she is grateful for — her husband knew the situation was bad.
“I was afraid of the worst outcome,” Javier said.
That worst outcome started as a fear of his son’s death. But as Javier learned more, that fear evolved to his son being stuck in a vegetative state, noncommunicative and bedridden, forever.
To cope, Javier found himself spending a lot of time in the hospital’s chapel.
“I just kept on going back, going back, and God knows what you’re going through when you’re going through something like this,” he said. “I just know that he knew it was on my heart and the concerns I had.”
One day, he sat in the chapel and received an answer from God “that it was going to be OK,” he said.
He knew the situation was still dire and could get worse. But he knew they would be able to “weather this storm.”
His son would be in a coma for several days.
At least one member of his family was with Roman in the hospital 24/7, except for one week when visitors weren’t allowed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But doctors soon realized that the family’s presence was a boon for Roman and allowed them back in, one at a time.
Once awake, Roman still faced an uphill battle. He had to relearn how to hold up his head, sit up and walk. He could barely string a sentence together.
“He wasn’t even there really,” Verna said.
He spent two months in the hospital before returning home to Washington with his family in May 2020, but it was difficult to figure out his next steps, according to his mother.
“They just let us go from Utah, like, ‘OK, here, go do these things,’” Verna said.
The worldwide pandemic complicated the situation. The Ruizes struggled to even find a doctor with so many offices and clinics closed. They finally found one in Spokane, two hours away. They would visit every other month.
The family also sought treatments to supplement his occupational, speech and physical therapies. After reading an article by personal trainer J.J. Virgin on how a hyperbaric chamber helped her son who suffered a traumatic brain injury, they searched for one locally.
The hyperbaric chamber would allow more oxygen to enter Roman’s brain and help it heal. Once again, they found one in Spokane but not locally.
For the hyperbaric chamber to be effective, Roman would have to use it for 40 consecutive days. Javier weighed moving to Spokane or purchasing a hyperbaric chamber for their home, both of which would be costly.
Then a miracle happened.
Cassidy Yepez, who had known Roman since middle school, read an article in the Tri-City Herald, the local newspaper, about Roman and his need for a hyperbaric chamber.
Yepez worked as an assistant coach at the Pacific Clinic, which was just reopening after the pandemic and had a chamber Roman could use just 20 minutes from his home. She reached out to her bosses about helping her former classmate and then messaged Verna on Facebook, inviting Roman to the clinic.
The article Yepez read was meant to be published months before she read it, but it had been delayed. Ahead of its publishing, the reporter reached out to the Ruizes again, who informed him they were now looking for the chamber.
If the publishing hadn’t been delayed until after the search for the hyperbaric chamber began, Yepez wouldn’t have known that her former classmate needed it.
Rebuilding through regenerative training
On a September day in 2020, Yepez went into the bathroom at Pacific Clinic and cried.
Roman and his family had just left their first meeting at the clinic, and the one-time college athlete was far from the person Yepez had known growing up. He practically had to be carried up the stairs.
“It was a shock to my system to see someone that I knew as such a healthy, active person to then when he came in, he had poor controlled facial expressions, really poor motor skills,” said Yepez, now the clinic’s marketing director.
Then there was Roman’s short-term memory struggles. Yepez likened him to Ten Second Tom from the movie “50 First Dates.”
“Every 15 seconds, 30 seconds, it was like he’d go, ‘Where am I? Who are you?’ It was like his brain would not keep things,” said Steve White, founder and owner of Pacific Clinic.
During that first meeting, Roman rode a stationary bike as part of a breathing program. He would start riding, and then suddenly, he’d either get up or stop and look at the bike confused. A guest neurologist at the meeting told White, “Every 20 seconds, his brain is reloading. It doesn’t know where he’s at.”
For someone suffering from an injury like Roman’s, it’s widely believed that the majority of what that person will regain occurs in the first six months, White said.
When Roman first came to the Pacific Clinic, it had been eight months since his accident.
White believes in “stacking” treatments, so when the Ruizes asked what modalities the clinic would try, his answer was “everything.”
“All I know is I’m not betting on one thing,” White said. “I’m betting on helping him fight and all these different things.”
Some of those treatments included hyperbaric oxygen therapy, transcranial photobiomodulation, brain HIIT and adaptive contrast therapy.
The Ruiz family spent hours at the clinic every day to give their son the best shot at getting better. The entire family’s support has been crucial to Roman’s recovery, according to both Yepez and White.
“I think it played a huge part, especially in the beginning because Roman didn’t know why he was doing it, and they would constantly remind him and give him his best hope,” Yepez said. “I definitely think they are 100% responsible for his success because of how they didn’t give up.”
Sometimes Roman would come to his parents in tears and apologize for being a burden. Because of his short-term memory struggles, he’d forgotten he had already apologized and would do it one or two more times that day. Each apology resulted in more tears from both parties.
“That feeling was in his heart, like he felt he had to share and retell us he was sorry for everything,” Javier said.
‘People ought to know his story’
On that late August afternoon as we talked in the Ruiz’s living room, Roman’s eyes welled up with tears again. But this time, those feelings of being a burden were replaced with gratitude.
“This didn’t have to happen to me,” he said. “It happened to me because I have amazing parents who are willing to research and put in work and to do things to help their son.”
It took three or four months before White saw an improvement in Roman. It coincided with him finally learning to fight for himself, which is a major emphasis at Pacific Clinic.
White would tell Roman, “Nobody can put a limit on you. Nobody. Anybody who does, you don’t listen.”
One day White walked into the room and saw a dejected Roman. He recalled Roman telling him that he couldn’t “really remember high school.”
“He was so articulate,” White said. “I got big ol’ tears. I was like, ‘Roman, you’re talking. ... Do you realize that five months ago you couldn’t talk?’ And he’s like, ‘No, I don’t remember that.’”
Roman continued to progress over the four years he spent in the regenerative training program at Pacific Clinic. When he finished, he was far from the young man who entered that first day in September 2020.
“From a skeptic’s perspective, he’s so much far beyond what you could have thought,” Yepez said. “I think Roman has the power to take his life wherever he wants.”
Roman Ruiz has become an inspiration to those who know his story, including Bailey, the man who saved his life. The two have maintained contact and see each other at least once a year.
Bailey has since decided to “make sure that I’m doing as much with my life as he’s doing with his.”
“I think that he displays such courage and optimism in the face of — the odds are not insurmountable, but they almost are,” Bailey said. “The fact that he’s chosen to just go after it with all his heart, might, mind and strength is just — people ought to know his story, and if they do, they can’t help but say, ‘What am I doing with my life, and how can I do with my life what Roman is doing with his?’”
Back on the track
Roman Ruiz was a football and track and field star at Chiawana High School. At Utah State, he committed to track and field, specifically the decathlon, and had Olympic aspirations. He knew it would require a lot of hard work, but he believed he could do it.
Erik Rasmussen, Utah State’s multi-events and jumps coach, told the Deseret News that Ruiz is still “one of my absolute favorite athletes of all time.”
“He was a phenomenal athlete,” Rasmussen said. “That was pretty obvious with how he was continuing to improve on his performances over the years. But he was also just (a) great teammate, always had a great attitude when he came to practice. He worked really, really hard, picked up things pretty quickly, but also brought just like a happiness to practice every day, and that was infectious for other people.”
In his freshman season, Ruiz placed third in the heptathlon at the Mountain West Indoor Championships and fourth in the decathlon at the Outdoor Championships. His championship performances rank him fifth all-time in school history in the heptathlon and eighth in the decathlon, per the university.
He redshirted his sophomore indoor season and was prepping for the outdoor season when he collapsed on the track. The season was ultimately canceled five days later due to the pandemic.
Rasmussen was camping with his family in Moab, Utah, when he got the call that Ruiz had collapsed. Shocked, Rasmussen cut his trip short and drove back up to Logan that day, stopping at the hospital to visit him.
“When you have an athlete that works that hard and does everything that you ask him to do, you don’t expect them to just have an instant like that,” he said.
Following his cardiac arrest and brain injury, Roman Ruiz held out hope he could rejoin the team and reached out to the Utah State coaches often. Since 2021, he has attended and watched the Aggie Invitational with his parents every year.
In 2024, the team invited him to train with the athletes for a week and to compete unattached at their annual home indoor meet. Knowing he wouldn’t be as good as he used to be, he was apprehensive to compete, but he decided to give it his best effort.
His performance in one of the pole vault drills that week was even better than before his collapse, according to Rasmussen.
“It was really fun to have him that week, and you could see his progress going from difficult to have a conversation … to now, it’s like talking to the old Roman, you know?” Rasmussen said. “He’s just that same happy, kind, supportive (person) but also driven to continue to be a better person and to just keep getting better.”
At the meet, Utah State surprised him by renaming the meet the Roman Ruiz Speed and Power Meet.
“My track career or season, whatever you call it, like, it’s over,” he said. “But I left a mark.”
What’s next for Roman Ruiz?
Though he enjoyed reconnecting with track and field, Roman has since accepted that his days of competing are past him.
Instead, he’s resigned himself to passing on his knowledge of the sport as a volunteer assistant coach for both Special Olympics and Chiawana High School, which he’s done for the last three years.
The 27-year-old returned to school last fall, taking one class a semester at Columbia Basin College as he relearns how to learn. He studied accounting at Utah State but is considering a new major and career, including becoming a doctor to help people like himself.
He often helps around the house by cooking and doing yard work, but newer or unfamiliar tasks may just take him longer.
“He just has to relearn or refamiliarize himself with some of the things that we take for granted every day,” Javier Ruiz said.
He has worked random jobs, volunteered at a local food bank and started volunteering in Pacific Clinic’s regenerative training program.
The goal for Ruiz now is to “just be out in real life doing real life things,” his mom said.
Some of those “real life things” revolve around Ruiz’s faith as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
On Mondays, he attends his young single adult branch’s family home evening activities. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he goes to institute classes. On Saturdays, he works in the Columbia River Washington Temple. And on Sundays, he attends church.
Spirituality has been a constant in Ruiz’s life. He regularly studies the scriptures and shares messages of hope with his family, according to his father.
Though he has defied the odds and expectations, Roman Ruiz still has work to do.
“The story’s not over,” his dad said. “There’s more that’s going to come out of this. There’s more good that’s going to come out of this that’s still left to be done.”
Ruiz still struggles with his short-term memory. But in our nearly two-hour conversation that August afternoon, Ruiz only repeats himself once. Only once does he ask for the question to be repeated.
He continues to do therapy at home. Every morning after his daily run, he listens to frequencies through a set of headphones for 20 minutes. The frequencies help his brain heal faster, he said. He does breathing exercises to imitate adaptive contrast therapy and wears a photobiomodulation helmet like he did at Pacific Clinic.
There’s more that Ruiz wants to accomplish. Someday, he wants to be a husband and father and to finish school. When he and his family discuss those goals, it’s not a matter of “if” but “when.”
“We talk about it as just like, well, this is a reality,” Javier said. “It’s not wishful thinking.”
Roman is doing his part to achieve those goals. A month before our interview, he went on his first date since his cardiac arrest.
“There’s some long-term goals here, and he’s set to accomplish them,” Javier said. “It just might take longer than the average person because of this unique experience. But that’s where the trust comes in in Heavenly Father and his plan.”
Over the last five and a half years, the scripture Isaiah 40:31 has become a Ruiz family motto.
Roman, who has the scripture memorized, has come to know that what it says is true, that “they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”
“So, much to be grateful for and we owe it all to Heavenly Father,” Javier said.
Questions of “why me?” plagued Roman early in his recovery. He had served a two-year church mission in Rome, and in college, he regularly worshipped in the temple and at church.
So why did his life have to be upended?
He still doesn’t have the answers to those questions. But when Ruiz talks about his cardiac arrest now and the journey it’s taken him on, he does so with faith and trust in God.
“I feel like at the end of the day, we can realize, this is God’s plan,” Ruiz said. “Whatever is happening or whatever has happened, it’s God’s plan. Because I’m still recovering, he still has the plan that’s laid out. Well, I gotta continue on that, keep working.”
