In Grateful Nation's Spotlight Series, well-known people from all walks of life discuss the idea of gratitude. What does it mean to them? What is its role in their lives? How have they been bettered by expressing their gratitude? Check back frequently to see who's contributing to the greater grateful good.
"Grateful is a great word."
Nick Buoniconti - Former New England Patriot and Football Hall of Famer, Member of Grateful Nation
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Nick and Lynn Buoniconti know firsthand the significance of being in the right place at the right time, from turning points in their careers to tragic events in their personal lives. After seven years as the defensive star of the Boston (now New England) Patriots, it was not Nick’s first choice to be traded to the Miami Dolphins in 1969, but the move led this self-proclaimed “Massachusetts boy” to two Super Bowl rings and a stint on the only undefeated team in the history of professional football. A chance summer job while she was a New Jersey school teacher caused Lynn to pick up and move to Manhattan to open her own upscale travel agency, a business she ran for 18 years. “Sometimes it’s fortuitous,” says Nick. “Sometimes things happen for a reason.”
Often those reasons are unclear at the outset. It’s not everyone who can draw meaning and motivation out of tragedy. When they met, Lynn knew that Nick was a former pro athlete and a lawyer, but, she recalls, “what impressed me most about Nick was what he had done with his life going forward and what he had done for his son—the dedication and love that a father had for his son.” A spinal cord injury incurred during a college football game left Nick’s son, Marc, paralyzed from the neck down and started them both on a crusade—primarily through their work at The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis—to expedite research to get people with similar injuries out of wheelchairs and walking again.
Just last November, Lynn and Nick were confronted with the very real possibility that her son from a previous marriage would be one of those people. A Georgetown senior visiting friends at Harvard, Justin suffered a skull fracture as a result of an assault, leaving him with a scale of brain injury from which half of patients die and only about 2 percent make a total recovery. Again, fate intervened. “Justin was just lucky that the ambulance took him to Beth Israel [Deaconess] and into Dr. Thomas’s care,” says Nick. “I’m not saying that there are not other doctors in Boston who could have taken care of Justin, but we know for a fact what Dr. Thomas did and the medical treatment that he gave Justin was just superlative.”
Not only did Dr. Ajith Thomas, chief of cerebrovascular surgery at BIDMC, do everything right for Justin clinically, he also never forgot that his young patient had a family and friends who had just had their world turned upside down. “I don’t know, maybe it was the sound of his voice,” says Lynn, “but how he presented all of these facts and data, and the compassion with which he did it, how he explained it, was just reassuring at a time when my son was lying in a coma paralyzed.” She recalls the special touches in his care, from consulting a brain trauma expert at an outside hospital to allowing Justin’s friends into the ICU to show them he was still alive. Thanks to the expeditious treatment of Dr. Thomas and his team, Justin graduated from Georgetown with his class and is now working in New York City, suffering few lasting side effects from the incident. “I’ll be forever grateful to everyone at Beth Israel [Deaconess] who made what could have been a very tragic thing into a wonderful, wonderful result for our family,” says Lynn.
Nick says that he is sure that an outcome like Justin’s is the rule rather than the exception at BIDMC—and that with each life-saving event comes an opportunity that can change the future. “It’s because of grateful patients that we even exist,” he says of nonprofit medical organizations like BIDMC and The Miami Project, “because if it wasn’t for them then the research that would be necessary to make things better would never take place.” See, things do happen for a reason.