My Life Outside the Ring (30 page)

I just wish I could go back and find out
why
. What was John thinking? Why
wasn’t
he thinking? The sad thing is, until a miracle happens and John’s completely healed, that’s a question I’ll never get answered.

It’s these kinds of questions that have rattled around in my brain every day since that horrible day. Every day. Nonstop. I can’t stop thinking about it.

Chapter 16

The Vigil

We never left the hospital
that night. Once Nick’s wrist was set and they’d checked him to make sure there wasn’t any internal bleeding—which there wasn’t, thank God—we camped out and waited for news about John.

At some point, John’s family started to arrive, along with this girl Ashley who claimed to be John’s fiancée. His brother Michael showed up, and his sister came. Seeing John’s mother, Debbie, really choked me up. I just remember hugging her. I remember her hugging Nick. She was so glad Nick was okay. We were all just sitting there worried to death and praying together to hear some good news about John. Debbie’s son. My son’s best friend. The marine. The soldier. This kid whom I’d grown surprisingly close to in the past few years.

By the end of the first day, it was clear that John had suffered a real serious brain injury. He was unconscious. He was unresponsive. Doctors were using every drug in the book to try to reduce his brain’s massive swelling. His condition was so serious, they kept him in the ICU, and for days and days no one was allowed to visit him for more than fifteen minutes at a time, once every few hours. Brooke and Linda were there by morning, and between our family and the Grazianos there were a lot of people trying to see him. So the hospital set aside a room where all of John’s family and friends could gather.

When it comes to brain injuries, the first hours of treatment are critical. That’s when most of the damage is done. I’ve learned a lot about this stuff since the accident happened, and in my opinion John was flown to the wrong hospital that night.

I wish he had gone to Tampa General, where they have an advanced brain trauma center, not to mention some of the best neurologists you can find anywhere in the United States. He didn’t. Instead, the medevac helicopter had dropped him at Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg, where doctors were giving a grim diagnosis from the start. They pumped him so full of drugs to try to reduce his brain swelling, they seemed fearful that the rest of his body just might shut down altogether.

By the second day, John’s father, Ed Graziano, seemed to have given up on the idea that his son could recover. He got real mad and started pacing the halls making all kinds of noise. Ed basically wasn’t even a part of John’s life in the last couple of years before the accident. John told me he wanted nothing to do with him.

After a few days of monitoring John’s condition, I didn’t feel that he was getting the best treatment. So I took the advice of one of my neighbors on Willadel, Steve Chapman, and called Dr. Fernando Vale (pronounced like “valet”)—one of the top neurosurgeons at Tampa General. He took a look at John and convinced the doctors there to remove a large portion of John’s skull to allow the brain to swell naturally, and then retreat when it was ready—so they wouldn’t have to keep pumping him full of drugs.

I truly believe that if they had taken that action and removed the pressure on his brain immediately when John was brought in on the night of the accident, John would have been well on his way to recovery.

From the moment
that accident happened, I pretty much stayed at the hospital every afternoon and every evening. Nick, Brooke, and Linda were there a lot, too, in the first few weeks. I was there all the time.

Ed wasn’t there much but John’s mom, Debbie, was there and never left. Truly never: She slept right there in that hospital.

I guess we were a little over a week into this vigil when I finally said to Debbie, “You know, there’s a beautiful Hilton hotel a block away from the hospital, or if you don’t like the Hilton, there are others.” I told her I’d be happy to pay for it. I just thought that she should get a good night’s sleep. As concerned as she was, she wouldn’t be any good to John if she got sick herself from lack of rest.

In the end I got three rooms at the Vinoy: one for Debbie, one for Ed—because they were separated—and one for Ed’s parents, who had flown down from New York. Ed and Debbie weren’t getting along though and the arrangement didn’t last long. The family left the Vinoy and I paid for Debbie to stay in a different hotel.

My Happy Home

The Grazianos weren’t the only ones who had trouble in their home life, of course. As much as I didn’t want to think about it or focus on it, the trouble with Linda was still unfolding even in the aftermath of this accident.

It was real strange having Linda back home. I was hardly there. I stayed at the hospital as much as I could. Linda, Brooke, and Nick were sometimes with me, but when we crossed paths at the big house, it was tense.

Linda was drinking pretty much every night, and it seemed that her behavior after the accident was more more volatile than ever.

Three or four days after Nick’s crash, I came home and heard Linda screaming upstairs. She was up in Nick’s room, and the door was closed. When I realized she was yelling at my son, I opened the door—and found Linda standing over Nick with a wine bottle in her hand and screaming like a madwoman, “You’re going to fucking jail! You’re finished!”

I pulled Nick out of there as quickly as I could, and she flailed off screaming unrepeatable obscenities as she stumbled toward our bedroom.

Nick was a wreck. He was so fragile already. This accident had put him in a terrible place that he’d never been in before. He felt deeply responsible for what happened to John. He felt guilty. He didn’t need this. No one needed this.

As much as she was on Nick, she was on me and Brooke, too. For a long time I had been wishing for my family to come together again. Now I wished that Linda would just leave.

Every night she was threatening divorce. She meant it this time—I saw how she had changed—but how could she be thinking of divorce right now? It just seemed so selfish to me.

I practically begged her, “Please, don’t file. Our son’s just had this accident. If we do this now, it’ll make us look like the Britney Spears family. Please, don’t file for divorce!”

I thought the idea that we would be publicly humiliated and raked through the tabloids might have some effect on her. Linda enjoyed her newfound fame, so obviously she wouldn’t want this in the papers, right? I went so far as to tell her that if she was really hell-bent on ending this thing, I’d be willing to go ahead and get a mid-nuptial agreement. I said we could go to our financial attorney, Les Barnett, and draw up some papers and separate—but we wouldn’t have to tell anybody. We could keep it private, and try it for a while; she could have all the money she wanted and everything she needed to live on her own in California, and then we could see if things got better.

Linda wouldn’t hear it. I couldn’t talk any sense into her. It’s almost as if she wanted things to stay as awful and miserable as they were.

Linda was often
perfectly normal by day, just like before she split for California. Once the wine wore off, we’d get along and get through this, and communicate as best we could. I even saw glimpses of the old Linda I fell in love with.

As we went into the second week of the hospital vigil, waiting and waiting for even the slightest improvement in John’s condition, Debbie still looked real tired to me. I finally said, “Debbie, you know, this hotel thing is just too much. For John’s sake, you need to go home and get some rest.” That’s when I realised things had got so bad she couldn’t go home.

At that point, John still wasn’t showing signs of making a rapid recovery. None of us knew how long this might go on. I really felt bad for her. I wanted to help her. And Linda felt the exact same way.

So we rented Debbie a beautiful townhouse on Island Estates. Linda went out and bought her tons of furniture, just to make her feel at home. Comfy beds, and sofas, and flat-screen TVs, and every appliance and utensil she’d ever need in the kitchen. Believe it or not, Linda did that out of the kindness of her heart. Linda’s got two sides. When the chips are down she’ll take her shirt off her back for you—and then if she doesn’t like you, she’ll stab you in the back. But I know that she would have gone out and spent that kind of money for anybody in Debbie’s situation.

Months later, the Grazianos’ lawyers would accuse us of making a hollow attempt to pay Debbie off and convince her not to sue us. That simply wasn’t the case at all. I knew the Grazianos would likely have to sue in order to pay for John’s medical care. I understood that. I even talked to Debbie about it. “Debbie, I know you’re gonna have to sue me. I understand that eventually you’ll need to find a way to help pay for John getting back on his feet. Let’s not even worry about that.”

In a time when it seemed like nothing could make the situation worse, Debbie’s father died. She asked if we could help with the funeral expenses, and we did. We took her other son, Michael, and enrolled him back in college, simply because he hadn’t been in college for a while and we were trying to get their life back to some type of normalcy.

Normalcy. It seemed like the thing she wanted most.

If John had been injured by somebody else, or in some other car accident, or if he had come back from fighting in the Middle East with some life-threatening injury, I think we would have done the exact same thing for his family. It wasn’t unusual behavior. I mean, Linda used to buy our housekeepers new carpet when they needed it. I haven’t had a housekeeper yet that I haven’t bought a car. That’s how Linda is. She’s over the top. That’s the Linda I fell in love with, who was always so positive and uplifting. I loved seeing glimmers of that. It actually gave me some hope for our marriage again.

Considering how much time John spent at our house, and how close he was to Nick? Doing everything within our means to help his family wasn’t even a question.

Dead or Alive

It’s hard to remember the time line of how things went down in that hospital. The days and nights seemed to blend together. I think it was right around the start of the third week when something terrible happened. Something that I still can’t shake.

I came to the hospital that night, right around dinnertime, and no one was in John’s room. Even though he couldn’t respond, I rubbed his hand and talked to him like I always did—saying all these real positive things, trying to pump him up and challenge him to get better, telling him he could do anything he put his mind to. That same sort of push we would give each other in the gym. He always responded to that kind of motivation before the accident, so why wouldn’t his mind respond to it now? That was my thinking, anyway.

By this time I’d started to learn what all the lights and beeps on the machines meant, and I noticed that his oxygen level was real low. I asked a nurse about it, and she said they had blood on order for him. His blood levels were down about four pints is what they told me, but the blood hadn’t come up from downstairs yet. It’s the kind of stuff that happens in hospitals that just makes you insane. Someone needs blood and they have it downstairs, but no one’s brought it up yet? Excuse me? It’s not a pizza delivery!

So anyway, I’m in there talking to John, spending some time with him, and Debbie and a friend of hers came in. As soon as they walked in they both commented that John’s color didn’t look so good. And not three seconds after I put John’s hand in Debbie’s hand, he flatlined.

Beeeeeeeeeep.
It happened out of nowhere. Just like that. The alarms went off, and about ten nurses and other hospital personnel came rushing into the room while the three of us pushed back against the walls, worried to death.

I’ve never been around anything like that. This big, heavy lady started pushing on his chest. The others were all checking the tubes and wires. But nothing was happening.

Then out of nowhere this male nurse Jamie, this guy with a small frame on him but who’s really well built and muscular, came rushing in and pushed that big nurse out of the way. He yelled at one of the other nurses to get him this box of some kind that was on the floor, and she grabbed it and put it down on the other side of the bed. “No!” he yelled. “On this side!” He wanted the box to stand on.

So Jamie climbed up on that box and started pumping on John’s chest. It looked like he was completely crushing John’s ribs. He pumped and pumped and pumped. This must’ve gone on for like two or three minutes. It was intense. Jamie just wouldn’t stop. He was soaking wet with sweat—and then all of a sudden, as quickly as this whole thing started, it stopped. The machines came back on. The beeping started. John’s color came back. He was breathing again. Just like that. He’s remained pretty stable ever since.