2000fish's Blog – Steve Wozniak's hunt for fish species

DATELINE: SEPTEMBER 1, 2024 – COOPER HOSPITAL REGIONAL TRAUMA CENTER, CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY

Dear Nadia,

This story, as all of mine do, starts and ends with a fish. But as you know, nothing that happened in between these two particular fish was any fun.

Your Mother is one of my best friends, and I have known you and your older brother since birth. Jibril, always a suspicious-smelling toddler, grew into a great fishing buddy and has been made fun of in this very blog several times over the years.

You were always far more cultured and kept your distance from things fish-related, generally communicating through eye-rolls and the occasional sigh. Marta and I still enjoyed watching you grow up, from an adorable but stubborn toddler to an adorable but stubborn teenager to a talented (but stubborn) young woman entering college.

Your singing voice and humor always brought us great joy, although my favorite young Nadia story is when you were traveling with friends in France and missed your Mom so much you sent her a video of yourself crying to prove how much you missed her.

It was a year ago when we almost lost you.

This was supposed to be a blog about stingray fishing with your brother and cousin, but events overtook that, and being that you missed a lot of what happened, I decided I would write it all down. Please forgive any artistic liberties I have taken, especially regarding Ari and the plumbing. 

All our love,

Steve and Marta

Jibril, at arm’s length. They always thought it was funny to hand him to me when his diaper was about to fail.

Nadia celebrates acceptance at UC Irvine, home of the Anteaters.

As our story begins, Jibril (and Nadia) were in college, so I didn’t get the chance to take Jibril out fishing as much as I would like. (Oh, and Jibril has a girlfriend, so that may have something to do with it, although if they split up, we would keep Juliette.)

Last summer, in early August, it happened that Jibril and his New Jersey-based cousin Zach were together in San Francisco and wanted to hit the water with me.

Jibril and I have fished together for years. He’s actually a good-looking kid, but he never seems to photograph well around me.

It was a good tide for bat rays, and there is nothing more fun than taking two overconfident young men out to Tiburon and watching them try to land 50 pounds of angry stingray.

We started on the pier. I swear Jibril is normal-looking. He’s just never ready for photos.

Individually, I am certain the three of us are reasonably smart, but it is a proven scientific fact that men, when gathered in groups of two or more, become idiots. It was an epic night, filled with juvenile humor, pizza, plenty of fish, and more juvenile humor. This is what I live for.

The exhausted boys with one of their rays.

A month later, Danielle and family were off in New Jersey, visiting her parents and assorted relatives, including Zach, his father David, and Zach’s dog Gus, who is also an idiot, even by himself.

Gus, wearing the Cone of Shame. He had probably eaten something he shouldn’t have, like a printer.

It was shaping up to be an uneventful late-summer family visit. It certainly wouldn’t compare to their Easter trip, when Nadia’s boyfriend, Ari, entered the wrong bathroom at the wrong time and was blamed (unjustly?) for one of the more ghastly plumbing failures to ever strike South Jersey. It’s one thing when a plumber won’t come back and finish a job; it’s another thing entirely when he runs screaming into the night and joins the priesthood.

Ari is the blond kid at upper right. The rest of the group, L-R, is Jibril, Juliette, Ziad (Danielle’s husband & Jibril and Nadia’s Dad,) and Nadia.

The boys did some fishing in New Jersey. I can’t wait to see their facial expressions when they catch an adult bass.

Nadia caught her own fish, and she managed to not look like an ill-planned Tik-Tok performance.

But life can change in an instant. I awoke September 1 to a string of texts from Danielle, which included a news article about a traffic collision. I didn’t piece it together immediately, so I called.

She could hardly speak. There had been a terrible car accident. Jibril, Nadia and Zach were heading home from fishing, of all things. Just a couple of miles from home, some jackass in a stolen car blew a red light at over 100 miles an hour and blasted the front end off their car. Zach’s arm was badly broken, and Jibril had serious internal damage. Nadia, in the back seat, had grave head injuries, and was taken from the scene not expected to live. The collision was close to Danielle’s family home, so she was on the scene as the ambulances arrived, and no mother should ever have to see what she saw. All three kids were taken to a top regional trauma center, Cooper in Camden, and that’s where Danielle was calling me from. When I sit down to try to describe a mother’s anguish, I still have no words.

I was on the next plane to Philadelphia. Danielle needed help wrangling visitors, running errands, and just generally being there. This is what friends do for each other, and because I know someone is going to ask, no, I did not even pack a fishing rod.

When I showed up at Cooper Hospital’s Regional Trauma Center, nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.

My home for a few days.

I had never seen Danielle this upset, and believe me, I’ve tried. Ziad, like me, was outwardly calm and had internalized a great deal of sorrow and anger. Someone had made an irresponsible decision and changed their whole family’s life, possibly forever. Danielle, a woman of great intelligence and communication, had only tears.

I visited Zach first. His upper arm had been snapped in half, and while that was miraculously the extent of his injuries, he was on serious painkillers. So he was a joy to talk to, although not much he said made any sense, which is pretty normal. So far so good.

He doesn’t remember this photo, or, for that matter, much of the week.

Jibril was next. It wasn’t good. He had been in surgery, losing, among other things, a section of intestine. (So Skyline Chili was out of the question.) He was sort of awake but obviously in a lot of pain. He recognized me, but I also think that my traveling there drove home the seriousness of the situation. People on opioids are an ideal conversational partner for me, because I can tell the fishing stories uninterrupted, but the real joy of this visit was seeing Juliette.

She was there from the moment he checked in and would not leave his side – I can’t imagine how comforting that was to him.

I met Juliette at my 60th birthday party. That’s her next to Jibril – you may not recognize him because the photo is halfway decent.

She was positive and unflappable in that room, although when she got outside to the waiting area where we spent so much time talking, waiting for test results, and waiting for any updates, she could cry like the rest of us. But Jibril, even though he looked like he was run over by a tank, was probably going to be OK.

In the waiting area, I met the last of the main group – Ari, Nadia’s boyfriend. Tall, quiet, and apparently very patient, he stood by stoically. They are a young couple but are a great match, and I don’t see how he kept it together as amazingly as he did. I tried to keep things as light as possible, because I don’t do well with feelings. As a matter of fact, when we shook hands, I blurted out the most inappropriate thing I could think of. “So, are you two staying together? Hell, if my college girlfriend went into a coma, I’d dump her over text.”

As you can imagine, he wasn’t expecting this. And there was that uncomfortable split-second, which felt like a week, where I wasn’t sure if he understood my sense of humor. But then, he actually laughed. I found out later it was the first time he had laughed in 48 hours. He still thinks it’s funny to this very day. So no, people, I am not a monster.

Later that afternoon, I got a chance to see Nadia. She was up on the intensive care floor, near our waiting-room base. I had time between Zach and Jibril visits, so I took a deep breath and walked into the ward. I went down five doors to the left, and there she was. Nadia – intelligent, beautiful, difficult Nadia, surrounded by machines, a pressure valve and brace drilled into her head, on a ventilator, IVs and sensor pads everywhere, face bruised and swollen beyond comprehension. It was dead silent except for the beeps and chirps of the equipment, just me and her. And I was so angry I could barely contain it. Some lowlife, someone I had never met and never will, had made choices that resulted in this. This was all avoidable, and every time I thought of that, I experienced nothing but pure rage. But no rage from me or anyone else was going to help her recover, and I decided then and there that I was only going to focus on whatever it took to bring her back from the brink, and that her family would get nothing but positivity from me, even when it was a total act. This doesn’t mean I’ll forgive the moron – I never will. I hope he lives a long life in a state prison. But I knew I wanted to know a fully-recovered Nadia the rest of my life and to never even learn the name of the man who hit her. I stepped to the corner of the room that couldn’t be seen from the door, and for the one time on the entire trip, completely broke down. I know the nurse heard me, but she was kind enough to let me compose myself. I walked out and resumed being whatever support anyone needed, but I will never forget that moment.

I bounced between Zach (always right after his pain meds,) and Jibril for a few days, and managed to get all the ambulatory folks out for Ari’s second Philly cheese steak. (His first had been at Easter. Do the math.)

By the time I flew home a few days later, Zach had been discharged, they were making plans to get Jibril out in a few days, and Nadia was in a coma.

Jibril rolls out of Cooper. Nice socks.

Nadia would be in that coma for five weeks. There were some good signs – a finger moved, better brain activity – whatever. And there were bad signs. But one day, when they went to change a dressing, Nadia put up a pretty good fight. I knew right then and there that her profound stubbornness, a quality I value in myself and yet question in others, would be the very thing that would get her through this.

I checked with Danielle almost every day. It would always be the same answer. “Stable.” The plan, and/or prayer, was for her to eventually get out of the coma to at least some degree and start rehabilitation in a nearby center, Jefferson, that specializes in that field. The range of possible outcomes was agonizing – there was some slight chance she would regain her pre-accident form, but much more of a chance of permanent and significant damage. This is what her parents had to live through, one minute, day, and week at a time. About four weeks later, Cooper finally cleared her for the short drive to the rehab facility.

As we got into October, Danielle and Ziad had fundamentally moved to Philadelphia to be near her for what was expected to be at least nine hard months. The first couple of weeks were especially rough, but Nadia finally started coming around. There were a series of firsts that no parent wants to ever have with a 19 year-old. First words. First steps. First eye roll. But after five weeks, she was so far ahead of expected that the medical staff was running out of stuff to do for her. She was speaking again – in two languages. She was asking for her dog. She was cautioning the hospital staff not to let Ari use the restroom on her floor.

Nadia and the gang at Jefferson. At this stage, she was so eager to leave she was trying to call Ubers.

On November 7, it was decided she would come home and finish rehabilitation there. If someone could get an “A+” in rehab, it would be Nadia – nothing short of a miracle. The way the nurses had explained it to me, if 20 young women had come in with the same injuries, 19 of them would have been dead or permanently brain-injured, and the other one of them would have been … Nadia. Every time I smiled with joy at Nadia’s progress, it was tempered with sobering thoughts of the other 19 women and their families.

They may have wheeled her in, but she walked the hell out.

The whole family, especially Nadia, was profoundly grateful to the incredible staff at Cooper and Jefferson, and the EMTs who pulled her from the wreck. These people saved Nadia against some very stacked odds, and as she goes on to live a full and amazing life, she will never forget them.

Nadia with EMTs Nick Furman and Wayne Alexander. These are the men who cut her out of the car and the first of a long list of people who saved her life.

Time wandered into the holiday season, and I was delighted when Danielle’s entire family RSVP’d for the Christmas party Marta and I hold at a premier local Italian restaurant, Mangia Mi. (Ask for Stephanie.) It would be the first time I would see Nadia since she got home, and honestly, I didn’t know what to expect.

With the exception of my outfit, it was a great party.

Marta has the same pants. (You may recognize the Andreoskys – Cooper has just graduated high school and is heading to college. The blonde woman is the Mayor of Danville.)

Nadia chatted with us – we had a long talk about how she was doing at school and rehab. Perhaps two minutes into the conversation, I said something stupid, and she rolled her eyes at me. I nearly cried. The things that made her Nadia were still there. There would be a long way to go, but she, through sheer force of will and a pinch of good luck, was beating the odds.

There she is. A lot can happen in three months.

A couple of weeks later, our families celebrated Christmas together. There was a lot to celebrate.

On December 30, schedules aligned for me to take Jibril and Ari fishing. Again, three reasonably intelligent men, and again, we regressed to idiots. Ari was still chuckling about the “dump her over text” joke. So I am not a monster, people.

Jibril has a neck. I swear it.

And yes, I caught the biggest perch.

We caught a few fish, had pizza, and went about our holiday season. Nadia had threatened to attend, but bailed out when I explained it would be eight hours on a cold pier. It felt like things had come at least some of the way back to normal.

As I write, Jibril and Nadia are back at their respective universities. There are still good days and bad days – not a month can pass without finding something that needs to be touched up – knees, ribs, etc. Nadia will have a longer haul, but the fact she’s back to a solid course load at a major college tells me things are going pretty well. Jibril, Zach, and Gus are still idiots. Ari is generally not an idiot, but don’t let him use the bathroom you just painted.

I have struggled for months to put some positive spin or lesson on this, and although I keep coming back to anger at the moron who hit them, I’m much more overwhelmed with gratitude that all three kids are still here. And I make sure to take time to see them whenever I can, because the one thing I lost in this whole mess was the innocence of believing that they are all guaranteed to be here forever.

And that, Nadia, brings us up to today. I thought you should have this, as perhaps a reminder to be grateful on some of the bad days, and to give you our story of what happened; who was around you, and who prayed for you every single day – while you were sleeping.

Steve