Robinson family copes with help of hockey world

Gregg Drinnan column from The Daily News of Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008:

These are not the best of times for Ernie and Dave Robinson, parents who buried their eldest son, Darcy, just under a year ago. They aren’t any easier for Ryan and Danny, Darcy’s brothers.
More than many of us they understand full well the meaning of that hackneyed phrase about time marching on. It does, you know, and it does so regardless of the pain involved.
Which is why the Robinsons soon will travel to Vancouver for a series of medical tests.
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A year ago, Darcy Robinson, a 6-foot-4, 240-pound defenceman who was the picture of health, was into his third season with Asiago HC, a team in Italy’s top hockey league.
And then it happened.
It was Sept. 27. Asiago’s season-opening game with AS Renon was three minutes old when Robinson, a Kamloops native, collapsed to the ice and died. His fiancée, Kristen Windsor of Kamloops, was in the stands.
How, people wondered, could something like that have happened to a physical specimen like Robinson?
As so often happens in situations such as this, there were rumours, all of them unfounded, as people searched for answers.
It turns out that Darcy Robinson’s heart, for whatever reason, just decided it had had enough. It happens, you know, and it happens with superbly conditioned young athletes far more often than we realize.
“His heart was fine, though,” Ernie, his mother, says and the tone of her voice tells you that she doesn’t understand. Why would she? How could she? As she says, her son was so concerned about his health that “he hardly even drank.”
So how could his heart, a heart that was so strong one moment, just quit? Why would his heart, so strong for so many years, decide to let down her son and cause so many people so much pain? Her son understood that his body was his temple and that he, and only he, was responsible for what he ingested. So how could this have happened? Why?
“He didn’t have any clogged arteries or anything like that. But he did die suddenly,” Ernie says. “I guess your heart goes into fibrillation and once you don’t have that rhythm it’s hard to get it back.”
An autopsy was done, of course, but it took the better part of a year for the report to get to the Robinsons. The Italians, it seems, take things like this rather seriously and there was the matter of translating and transcribing everything from Italian to English.
The report, Ernie says, contains words like “fibrillation” and “natural cardiac event” and “unusual original rhythm” and “arrhythmia.” It also indicates that Darcy had contacted a virus that ended up in the heart wall.
According to the report, he died of a natural cardiac event, something called ventricular fibrillation (VF) or sudden cardiac death.
That virus may have contributed to his death. But, for whatever reason, Darcy Robinson’s heart, which had been ticking so strongly for more than 26 years, up and quit. Just like that. Which is why it’s called sudden cardiac death.
According to emedicine.com, “VF is the primary cause of sudden cardiac death (SCD)” and “the incidence of SCD in the United States is approximately 300,000 cases per year.”
One of the symptoms of SCD is fatigue, although the same could be said for events preceding virtually any major cardiac event.
Ernie recalls her son, in one of their last conversations, talking about being tired.
“He said he thought he had the flu,” she recalls.
He talked to his mother about the start of each season in Italy seemingly getting harder, when he thought it should be getting easier.
“He went to camp and they practised twice a week . . . he thought he had the flu but of course he wasn’t going to miss the opening game,” Ernie says. “He passed his physical.”
Ernie points out that while her son passed his physical, “The team captain didn’t . . . because he had a heart murmur. He wasn’t cleared to play until January.”
All of which makes the web just that much more tangled.
“Darcy’s heart was completely clear,” his mother says. “His heart was healthy.”
Toxicology tests also were done.
“It came back absolutely clear. We have the report here . . . it says here, the negativity of chemical toxicology analysis . . . so nothing was found. It says he was very healthy,” Ernie says. “He didn’t have anything . . . our son was such a health fanatic he hardly even drank. There’s no rhyme nor reason . . .”
All of which makes what happened that much harder to comprehend.
“Yeah, it does (make it harder),” she says and her voice wavers just a bit. “Yeah . . . he took very good care of himself.”
So now Ernie and Dave, along with sons Ryan, 24, and Danny, 22, will journey to Vancouver and undergo tests in an attempt to discover whether they might be susceptible to the same thing. Might this be genetic? Might it happen to one of them?
“It’s for peace of mind,” Ernie says.
At the same time, they are well aware that this kind of thing can sneak up on you like a thief in the night. As Ernie points out, Darcy attended various training camps over the previous eight or 10 years and underwent vigorous physical testing.
“At those camps they have excruciating physicals,” Ernie says. “You would think that if he would have some kind of arrhythmia, it would have shown up.”
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Over the last year, while the Robinsons mourned the loss of a son and a brother, they have learned just how many people Darcy touched during his far-too-brief life.
Ernie can’t believe the number of people, most but not all from the hockey world, who have contacted them.
“We have received a lot of things, including a box of blueberry jam from a Darcy Robinson in Kentucky,” Ernie says with a laugh.
A couple from Saskatoon had one of the jerseys Darcy had worn when he played with the WHL’s Blades. That jersey was hanging in a cabin near Saskatoon.
“They went to their cabin around Easter, saw it and mailed it to us with a letter saying they had met him,” Ernie recounts. “Their daughter was getting married this summer to Jon Barkman who was the Blades’ captain one time when Darcy was there. Jon played in Italy . . . and had just talked to Darcy at an exhibition game.
“This couple just felt we should have the sweater.”
And then there are Robo’s Readers.
Darcy played parts of four seasons with the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, the Pennsylvania-based AHL affiliate of the Pittsburgh Penguins, who had selected him in the eighth round of the NHL’s 1998 draft.
The Robinsons had no idea of the impact their son had made in this hardscrabble area of northeastern Pennsylvania. And then, last spring, the Baby Penguins brought in Ernie and Dave for a weekend.
“He had a lot of fans in Wilkes-Barre,” Ernie says. “His friends at the Arena Bar and Grill . . . everyone was wonderful to us when we were there. One couple had won a game-worn jersey. They presented it to us during a game.”
A banner bearing Darcy’s No. 5 was raised to the rafters. The banner also includes the signatures of numerous fans, all of whom paid for that honour. The money went to a school that specializes in children with dyslexia.
“It was really nice . . . a very special weekend for us,” Ernie says.
More than anything, though, that weekend was about Robo’s Readers. The Baby Penguins turned a program known as the Penguins’ All-Star Reading Program into Robo’s Readers — Darcy’s nickname was Robo — and the Robinsons know this will be their son’s legacy.
“Darcy had dyslexia,” Ernie says. “Players have to do public service and one of the things he did was to go to school and talk about dyslexia and how important it is to finish high school.”
More than 8,000 children in 300 classrooms participated in Robo’s Readers last season and they combined to read more than 60,000 books. Read five books and a student gets a free ticket to a Baby Penguins game. The class that reads the most books is treated to a pizza party in a corportate box during a game.
“This program will continue every year,” she adds. “It’s an ongoing thing. It’s going to happen every year . . . Robo’s Readers.”
Darcy’s memory hasn’t been forgotten in Italy either. Asiago HC played the first Darcy Robinson Memorial game on Sunday, beating Bolzano 5-4. A commemorative plaque was presented and Asiago announced that Darcy’s No. 5 has been retired.
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In Kamloops, the gifts keep arriving.
“Little tree ornaments and things like that that have No. 5 on them,” Ernie says. “People in the hockey world . . . once they get to know a player they feel they are close to him. Players Darcy played with in Saskatoon sent candles . . . he certainly knew a lot of nice people.”
The Robinsons are discovering that their eldest son touched each and every one of those people.
Hopefully, there is at least some peace in knowing that.

Gregg Drinnan is sports editor of The Daily News. He is at gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca.