The biggest little city in the World

I hate this story.

I very rarely relive this moment, oh for so many reasons, but I feel like I must.

Maybe things will be healed when I write it down. Probably not but I will do it anyway.

The Biggest Little City in the World. Thats what they called it. There was a giant sign right in the middle of the main drag. The sign said The Biggest Little City in the World. And we drove under it 5 times a day. It was Reno Nevada and I spent a year there one month.

That was a joke I told constantly when we were there. HaHa, my jokes werent as funny as when hubby had cancer. I dont know why. Is Cancer funnier than a brain injury? I guess it is.

I just want to clarify that this is my account of what happened in Reno. This is how I remember the details of it. Maybe someone else will have something different to add and seriously I am not stamping my feet and saying NO its my way or the highway. No I believe that my vision of this may be skewed, but I have a very vivid memory of the moment that ruined so many lives and I am certain not many would argue with my account.

The call came at 8pm on a Tuesday, January 6th, 2004. Wow it has been over 4 years. So much has changed yet so much has stayed the same.

PS my kids fear calls in the night. Any calls. They believe that only bad things come with nighttime phone calls. I wish I could assure them that this wasnt true. But I cant, there were more phone calls in 2005 that changed our world. And they all came at night.

So the phone rings and we are at the store, our store, the one that has been stolen.

Hubby answers it, it is after hours and I wanted to just leave and not answer the phone. The phone call is from k.p. the sister of my sisters husband. She is talking and I start to hear my husband sounding concerned. It would be very unlikely for her to call us. At the store, at night, for any reason.

So I am hearing words like, blood loss, consciousness, alert, blah blah blah, I know my brother in law is vacationing in Tahoe, Nevada. And I know this is bad.

She tells my husband that Tizzy, my brother in law, her brother, was in a snowboarding accident. She thinks he is conscious and she thinks he will be ok but she wants us to tell my sister. My sister is 6 months pregnant with their first child and is just about getting home from work. We are across the country from where Tizzy is in the hospital in NY, where we live and we are still unsure of what has happened.

Hubby calls my mother who is en route from my fathers basketball game in Brentwood to their home in Selden. He tells her to pull over, she is not good in these situations. He tells her Tizzy was in an accident and that we have to go tell Merry my sister. She turns her car around and heads toward Plainview were my sister and tizzy live.

I drive to my parents house in Selden, about 10 minutes away to wait for my Dad to get home. I know when he sees my car there instead of my mothers he will panic and think something happened to her, so I wait outside and tell the story in 4 seconds.

My mother has reached my sister who has called tizzys family and gotten more information. She has called the Head Trauma Center were he has been taken and found out a lot of nothing. Then the doctor calls her back.

My father and I are driving from Selden to Plainview in a blue minivan and we are going as fast as we can for 2 rule following law abiding citizens.

My mother calls. Get here fast she says. It doesnt look good.

I drive faster and make stupid conversation because I cant stand silence. My father cant stand stupid conversation and can not speak about scary stuff. My father loves Tizzy. He was the son he never had and my mother never wanted.

We arrive in Plainview and Merry is on the phone with the doctor. I hear words like coma, first few hours being the hardest, head trauma, get to Tahoe.

Those hours are a blur. The doctor called multiple times. He said that head traumas are hard to gauge and that it could go either way. He said there was no way to tell until a few days went by. He suggested she get there quickly.

We didnt know if she could fly being over 6 months pregnant. We didnt care really.

I knew I had to go with her. I knew whether it was good or bad I was the only person capable of handling it with her. I didnt think about the logistics, who would take care of my kids, who would run the store, how I would fly but I just knew it had to be me.

My father thanked me for going. I know he couldnt. I knew no one could but me.

We couldnt get a flight out.

There are a lot of details here I am leaving out, like about tizzys family attempting to fly out without us. Or the fact that the company my sister worked for arranged for our flights, got us a car service here and in tahoe.

We couldnt leave until the morning. It was the first flight from New York to Reno. I have implemented a rule that makes my children unable to attend college outside a 5 hour radius. I have to be able to get to them in an emergency.
Not being able to leave was torture. We didnt know what we would find when we got there.

We were up all night. My hubby drove out with a bag of clothes for me. My mother drove back so she would be there when my kids woke up. They werent little but this was their favorite uncle tizzy and I didnt know how bad their reaction would be. They were 16, 15, 10 and 8.

In the morning a car service came to get us. We went to Kennedy airport where we left for Tahoe/Reno. The name of the hospital was Washoe Head Trauma Center. The flight was over 8 hours with a stop over in Phoenix. It was a very long trip. I desperately tried to assure my sister that things would be ok but I wasnt sure. She had a good feeling that by the time we got there he would be sitting up in bed talking to her.

Tizzys sister had said something about him not remembering my sister. I remember thinking Oh please that only happens in movies.

Even 6 months pregnant she was faster than I was, speeding through the airports on a mission for her life.

We landed in Reno and we found our car. The next part of our journey began but I will have to finish that tomorrow. It is too much emotion for one day.