FALL RIVER — His brain working at a mile a minute, neurosurgeon Steve Cobery did not notice the woman with him in the elevator at Rhode Island Hospital that day in 2005. She got a good enough look at him to inquire with the ICU nurse if he was Steve Cobery.

After she learned the man was indeed Steve Cobery, she shared with the nurse that she was a fifth-grade teacher from Sts. Peter & Paul School in Fall River and that she was at the hospital in support of a fellow teacher who had just undergone emergency surgery for a brain aneurysm. The nurse shared the information with Cobery.

The lights then came on brightly for Cobery, a Fall River native and Bishop Connolly High School graduate. He realized he had performed that specific life-saving brain surgery, though at the time he had had zero idea he was operating on his first-grade teacher, the same woman who 30-plus years earlier had guided his hand to teach him cursive writing.

Cobery said the teacher was using her middle name, not the first name he might have recalled from grade school. And her face was heavily taped. So there was zero recognition on his part.

Cobery next visited the recovering teacher, who was in a rare condition called "locked-in syndrome," meaning she was fully conscious but could not move at all, except minimal motor motor function, like eye movement or blinking.

“I said to her, ‘I can’t believe I’m here and I operated on you and saved your life,’” Cobery said. “And I said, ‘Did you know it was me?’ And she blinked. She knew it was me.”

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Ironically, Cobery said, he had originally doubted, very much doubted, whether surgery could help. He said he told himself the injury was too bad, the woman was 51, she’d never survive. “My mentor said, ‘Nope. She’s too young. Get her in there,’” Cobery said. “It was like a 20-second conversation.”

In 2012, Sts. Peter & Paul School at a ceremony honored Cobery as one of its distinguished Catholic school alumni. “It’s the craziest story,” Cobery added. “She sent a letter to that ceremony, and she said, ‘When I held his hands to teach him how to write, I didn’t know those same hands would be saving my life years later.’”

A man with an impressive resume and amazing professional stories, Cobery has come full circle. A visitor to all six continents and to 42 countries, the former U.S. Navy nuclear engineer (yes, nuclear engineer), and former Navy surgeon and an Afghanistan veteran, he now works his neurological wonders just a few miles from his childhood home on Thomas Street, in the city’s Flint section.

A recent and prized addition to Southcoast Health neurological group, Cobery’s home field, so to speak, is Charlton Memorial Hospital, which hosts a Level 1 trauma unit. Married and the father of four, Cobery also performs surgery at St. Luke’s Hospital in New Bedford, where there is a Level 2 trauma unit. He lives in Cranston, Rhode Island.

The son of a Stop & Shop grocer (father) and a telephone operator (mother), Cobery excelled as a student from the start, skipped second grade, and graduated No. 1 in his class from Bishop Connolly in 1983. He said his parents always stressed the importance of education and hard work. “I wouldn’t have anything if it wasn’t for my parents,” he said.

He praises his Jesuit education at Bishop Connolly for its emphasis on compassion. He said his best friends today — hunting and fishing buddies, godfather for their children — are old Connolly pals Lee Estes, Don Fleming, J.P. Nasser and Larry Mello.

Cobery attended Worcester Polytechnical Institute on an ROTC scholarship, choosing to study nuclear engineering. “Back then they weren’t making doctors out of ROTC candidates,” he said. The Navy put Cobery’s nuclear engineering degree to use, on submarines, for the next eight years. He estimates he spent three actual years of his life underwater.

But inside him was a desire, planted and germinated in childhood by the caring manner of his pediatrician, to become a doctor himself. His older brother, Jim, now an attorney with the New England Patriots, pushed him to pursue that dream. He agrees that nuclear engineering is not the classic segue into neurosurgery, though he knows another man who followed almost the same route.

“I always tell people,” Cobery said with a laugh, “rocket science got too easy, so I went into brain surgery.”

Though not directly, nor easily.

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His first application to medical school, at Brown, was met with a firm rejection letter even though he had met with the admissions dean who had told him Brown had a post-baccalaureate program for applicants like him and he only need apply. In a follow-up phone conversation, Cobery said, the dean told him he didn’t think Cobery could get into any medical school due to WPI’s pass/fail grading.

“I was devastated” Cobery said.

He said he went out for a run and said to himself that no one had ever told him he couldn’t do something, and the folks at Brown weren’t going to be the first. He applied the traditional way and was accepted into Dartmouth Medical School which had a joint program with Brown. Cobery not only graduated from Brown, in 2000, but did so as its top graduate going into surgery. Handed his diploma by that same dean, Cobery said he reminded the dean of their conversation six years earlier.

“All it takes,” Cobery said recently while standing in front of Bishop Connolly High School, “is determination and faith in yourself.”

With the Navy again footing the bill in exchange for future services, Cobery started out in pediatrics. But the engineer in him wanted to put those hands to use. Neurosurgery seemed a good fit. It fascinated him. He said he talked to a neurosurgeon at Brown who was serving as a mentor, and the mentor tried to dissuade him because it was a hard path and Cobery was a little older than most students. “But if you’re in medical school and you have drive — more important you have passion for the neurosciences — it’s highly likely you can get through a neurosurgical training program,” Cobrey said.

Cobery’s naval career ran from 1987 to 2015, with a mix of active and reserve duty. He retired as a commander. He did his internship at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Next, from July 2001 to June 2007, he was a resident in neurosurgery at Rhode Island Hospital.

For years, in the U.S. military world, the Air Force has supplied the neurosurgeons to Afghanistan, the Army to Iraq. In 2010, President Obama’s huge troop surge in Afghanistan stretched the existing force of Air Force neurosurgeons ultra thin, so the Navy joined the effort. Cobery volunteered, becoming, he noted, the first Navy neurosurgeon to deploy to Afghanistan.

He was coming off deployment to Germany the year before but saw Afghanistan as a special calling. With significant trauma experience from working at Rhode Island Hospital, Cobery knew he was better suited for front line Afghanistan than were doctors who for years had been at a Navy hospital in the United States, where all trauma goes to the civilian sector.

The hospital (first tent, then brick) was located in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban. His deployment, an hour from the front, lasted eight-and-a-half months. He handled 150 cases. He saw U.S. rockets launched. He heard U.S. Apache helicopters “zipping their Gatling guns.” He said he saw one enemy rocket hit NATO housing (two soldiers killed) about 75 feet from him. He could hear the rocket’s incoming zip and feel the concussion. Once the brick hospital was built, it became a target for the enemy.

At Southcoast Health today, he said, the turn-on sound made by defibrillators when they are tested is almost identical to the sound of the incoming rocket alarm at the Afghan hospital. “Whenever I hear it, I’m always going for the ground, almost,” he said.

Cobery shared two very special stories about two Afghan men — one a soldier, the other a villager — he was able to help.

“I had this guy get an IED blast through his face and it put a rod about this (3 inches) big through his sinuses. It bounced off the bottom of his skull and went into his spinal canal,” he said. “And I took that thing out of him. It was in the center of his head, so deep I had to push it out through his face.”

Cobery has a photo of the Afghan soldier and him standing next to each other, the next day.

“That’s why I have passion about this job. You think things are down, this is never going to work,” he said. “But you keep pushing. You keep working. And you’d be surprised by results sometimes.”

Another time, Cobery said, he saved the life of a village elder, age 41. The village people were so grateful and moved that they switched their allegiance to the United States/NATO forces. U.S. special forces members gave Cobery an award because it was a strategic village and the loyalty change was pivotal, enhancing U.S. success in the Arghandap valley. “You think of the ripple effects that you have, and that probably saved some soldiers lives,” Cobery said.

The way the hospital helped locals, as well as troops, made the Afghan people happy to have the U.S. medical personnel there. And that, he said, helped to make the hospital an important target for the Taliban.

The patient survival rate at the Kandahar hospital was, Cobery said, consistently 97% to 98%. He said such a rate was unattainable in previous conflicts, including the first Gulf War, because neurosurgery was too far from the front.

“Bringing us close like that really changed the dynamic,” he said. “And it also scared the hell out of the enemy because they knew we would just put them back together and fight them some more.

“That’s the proudest achievement in my medical career, to do what I did to help the troops, and the families of the troops, while I was there.”

Immediately before joining Southcoast, Cobery worked with a private group at a Level 1 trauma center in Norfolk, Virginia. He said that center was very similar to Rhode Island Hospital in its scope and magnitude. He was the group’s emergency neurosurgeon, doing 120 emergency cases a year. That would come out to one per day as he worked 10 days a month.

In January of this year, Dr. Mike Harrison of Southcoast contacted Cobery about the group’s need for another neurosurgeon, especially since St. Luke’s Trauma 2 unit had just opened. One of Cobery’s mentors at Rhode Island Hospital, Harrison had actually operated on Cobery’s father. “He’s a great surgeon,” Cobery said.

The offer’s timing was perfect. That same day, Cobery spoke with Dr. Matthew Philips, Southcoast’s chief of brain and spine services. He interviewed in April and officially joined the practice Aug. 15.

Cobery’s father died in June. His mother lives in Berkley and his family lives in the region.

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“I saw it as a great opportunity to get back home and finish my career in medicine, in the town I grew up (in),” he said. “I think you have the very best here in Fall River. It’s a center of excellence for the heart hospital. My work with the brain and spine center at Southcoast, which is newly a trauma center, I think we’ll make that a center of excellence, too.”

In Afghanistan, Cobery and other surgeons helped not only U.S. and NATO troops, but also civilians. And they helped train the native surgeons, an act, he said, which was intensely appreciated by those Afghan doctors because it helped them to help their own people.

“And now I’m back home helping my own people,” Cobery said. “It’s just funny how life works.

“I’ve had a crazy life and career. I thank God every day for all that I’ve been given.”