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Christmas Thanks

ChevyVanMiller

By ChevyVanMiller
in The Stadium Wall Archives

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ChevyVanMiller

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I've had quite a holiday season.

 

I got to realize a dream of having a book published and got to meet hundreds of wonderful people at various book signings. To top it all off, I had the honor and privilege of signing with one of my heroes, Marv Levy.

 

As a way to say thank you to everyone here on TSW, here is the entire text of the chapter featuring Gus Gioia.

 

Please join me in wishing Gus a very Merry Christmas and a healthy and happy New Year!

 

 

Bills Fans Support Family In Their Hour Of Need

 

Who can foretell for what high cause

This darling of the Gods was born?

 

Andrew Marvell

 

 

 

It’s called a “bump.”

 

In Internet message board parlance, to “bump” a message or “thread” is to add a new reply to the original posting, thereby “bumping” it back to the top of the listing. Without a bump, messages fall back in the listing order, and then disappear altogether. On December 9, 2002, the Gioia family of Seattle, Washington, rode the first waves of quite possibly the greatest Internet bump of all time.

 

Paul Gioia was born just yards from the Peace Bridge, which connects Buffalo, New York, with Fort Erie, Ontario. His family soon moved to the Eggert Road section of the Queen City. The Gioias quickly fell in love with the blue-collar neighborhood built by the sweat and toil of a cross-section of European immigrants who were proud to set down firm roots in the new land of America. It was while living there that Paul learned of the resiliency of the people of Western New York. Economic downturns, blizzards and condemning national press have all served to build a backbone in the denizens of Buffalo that can never be broken.

 

Years later, it would be that unbending community backbone that would help hold up Paul and his family in their greatest hour of need.

 

After high school, Paul spent many years in New York City before moving west to Seattle for a job opportunity. There, he met a young lady from Houston, Texas, named Angela and the two hit it off and began to date. Somehow, this mix of East Coast moxie and refined Southern charm struck a perfect chord within each of them and the two were married.

 

As Kurt Cobain was using “Grunge” music to make Seattle the hippest city in America, an old yearning began to visit Paul in the quiet hours of his mind. It was a call back to the days of his youth in Buffalo.

 

“I was never much of a Bills fan as a kid,” Paul said by telephone from his Seattle home. “I just remember my grandfather and his friends loving to watch O.J. run with the football.”

 

As a way to find a connection back to his city of birth, Paul became a passionate fan of the Buffalo Bills. He got DirecTV to watch all of the games and surfed the Internet to find any information he could on the red, white and blue Bills.

 

“You just don’t find people in Seattle that are like the people of Buffalo,” Paul said. “That internal fortitude, maybe it’s because of the snow and cold winters, even the four Super Bowl losses, the people just refuse to say die or ever give in. I knew that I needed to get connected back to that way of thinking.”

 

Paul became a regular visitor to a Web site that catered to fans of the Bills. After that address was suspended, Paul stumbled upon Two Bills Drive, the Web site that would one day make an impact on his life that he will never forget.

 

A popular section of Two Bills Drive is a message board called The Stadium Wall (TSW). There, Bills fans talk about the team 365 days per year. New coach hires, free agent signings, game analysis and spirited debate as to whether Mighty Taco or the Garbage Plate is Western New York’s best indigenous food, it’s all discussed in it’s finest minutia at TSW.

 

Paul became a regular contributor at TSW, posting under the screen name Thirdborn, and in the spring of 2002, he used the board to make the announcement that he and Angela were expecting their first child together in December. The pregnancy progressed normally and Paul and Angela found themselves excited about bringing another fan of the Buffalo Bills into the world.

 

On Friday, December 6, 2002, Angela was in a Seattle hospital in labor with what turned out to be a baby boy – August Salvatore Gioia. All seemed to be going well until things took a tragic turn for the worse just before the baby was born.

 

On the evening of December 9, 2002, an exhausted Paul took a brief respite from the hospital bed of Angela, where he had spent almost all of the proceeding 72 hours, and posted this message on TSW:

 

My wife went into labor Friday night, and the baby’s cord collapsed leaving him without oxygen for too long. After a brutal emergency caesarian, my son wasn't breathing, and had no heartbeat. It took ten minutes to bring him back, and I've been told that there's a 90% chance that he has suffered severe brain damage. My wife is fine, and my son is off the ventilator. We won't know anything more for days and I won't be posting anytime soon. He's strong, but we all need your prayers. His name is August Salvatore Gioia. Thanks!

 

"I ride with the boy King."

 

Gus, as his family would come to call him, was diagnosed with Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy (HIE), sometimes known as neonatal encephalopathy. HIE is an acquired syndrome characterized by evidence of acute brain injury due to asphyxia. The doctor on staff the night of Gus’ birth erroneously told Paul that his son had little chance of surviving more than a week (in truth, the mortality rate for severe cases of HIE is roughly 50%) and that if he did, he had little hope for a life beyond a vegetative state.

 

As you can imagine, this news hit Paul like a ton of bricks. With Angela still heavily sedated, Paul had to make some very difficult decisions concerning Gus’ treatment on his own.

 

Paul put out a call of distress to his family and soon the cavalry was on its way. Two of Paul’s brothers drove non-stop from their out-of-town residences to be at his side.

 

As Paul looked into the eyes of his beautiful little baby boy, he saw something there that was eerily familiar. It was a look of determination. It was the same look that he’d seen in the eyes of those who struggled through the Blizzard of ‘77. It was a look that he’d seen many times on the faces of his gridiron heroes, the Buffalo Bills. It was that exact look that took the team to four consecutive Super Bowls, a feat unmatched in the annals of the National Football League. It was that look that carried the team back from a 32-point deficit to defeat the Houston Oilers in a 1992 wildcard playoff game, better known as the greatest comeback in NFL history. And it was precisely that look that inspired ESPN host Chris Berman to coin the phrase, “Nobody circles the wagons like the Buffalo Bills.”

 

It was while thinking about these things that one of Paul’s brothers spoke just the words that he needed to hear.

 

“He said that no matter what, we can do it,” Paul explained. “The Gioia family isn’t going to give up.”

 

The second shot of tonic that Paul needed came when he checked in at TSW a few days later.

 

“I really didn’t expect a groundswell. When I saw what was happening, it just floored me,” Paul said.

 

What he found was the thread to his original message about Gus’ complications during delivery filled with hundreds of posts. Each of them pledged prayers for angels to look after Gus.

 

Here are a few of those posts:

 

These words may sound trite and it's impossible to convey true thoughts over this impersonal medium, but rest assured that your friends here (and even the gang at the PPP board) have you and your family in our hearts. – GG

 

I will pray all day and ask my family to do the same.

Please keep us posted, and feel the support you have.

May God bless you and your family. – Bill from NYC

 

I can't tell you how this bothers me. My prayers are with you. – Ice

 

I am meeting with Drew (Bledsoe) and his Dad at a Church tomorrow--and you can count on their prayers too. They have 3 little boys of their own. And remember, kids are tough little suckers and doctors, although educated, are frequently wrong.

 

God bless. – Ann Infamous

 

“These people, most of whom don’t even know me and my family, got me through that first week,” Paul said. “One guy even took a picture of Gus to his work and had the people there pray for him. What they did was amazing.”

 

On December 10, 2003, at precisely 6:37 P.M. Cablelady made the first of hundreds of postings with the same one-word message that would be added to the thread – Bump!

 

For nearly seven months, the thread was kept alive by posters who wouldn’t let Gus out of their hearts for even one moment. As the weeks and months passed, Gus went home and made steady progress. As Paul would add updates to the thread, the good news that he posted was always met with smiles and tears of joy on TSW.

 

Sometimes posters would log on to wish Gus a Merry Christmas or a Happy Easter, while other times it was simply to say goodnight and God bless.

 

There is no doubt that the thread would never have died out of its own volition. Worried that it was taking up so much bandwidth that it was in danger of crashing the TBD site altogether, Paul contacted the site administrator, Scott, and asked that the thread be retired.

 

Scott had no concerns over the size of the thread, but as he was in the process of changing message board software anyway, all posts from the old database were unable to be imported. Scott archived the thread and all 952 posts of it can forever be viewed at: http://www.twobillsdrive.com/gus/.

 

Scott has this to say about the response by Two Bills Drive members to Paul’s posting: "The love and compassion that we have for one another defines us as a community. The outpouring of prayers may have surprised Paul and his family, but it was not a surprise to me. Time and again, this community closes ranks around its members to provide emotional support when needed. Paul, Angela, and Gus will always hold a special place in the hearts of their extended family on the Stadium Wall."

 

Other threads to Gus are constantly being created and he will always be a permanent part of life at TSW.

 

Today Gus is continuing to make steady progress. He has begun to vocalize, is making strong eye contact, and Paul and Angela are teaching him sign language. He is seen by some of the nation’s premier neurologists at Children’s Hospital of Seattle and receives regular physical therapy and early intervention sessions.

 

Gus is a Gioia and he is a survivor.

 

Paul has a goal of one day bringing Gus back to Buffalo for a Bills game and to meet with the people that have touched their lives by offering their prayers on TSW.

 

When that day arrives, you can be sure that Gus will be surrounded by the beating hearts of hundreds of people, united by their love of a team and a city that never says die, who form a safety net that will always be strung up under his high wire. Those hearts will beat in harmony for the boy king of Seattle and it will sound just like this – Bump, Bump, Bump.

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