Positivity: For hospital-bound Saints fans, Super Bowl win will be good medicine
February 05, 2010, 9:01PM
Matthew Bertucci, Micah Roshell and Jamie Burt won’t take in Super Bowl XXIV at the kind of traditional parties that will fill homes, restaurants, bars and streets across south Louisiana on Sunday evening.
The lifelong New Orleans Saints fans instead will host smaller gatherings in their hospital rooms, where Bertucci and Roshell are battling cancer, while Burt rehabilitates from a construction-site accident that left him without the use of his legs.
Lest anyone think the mood won’t be festive, the patients and their loved ones are quick to say just how eagerly they await their team’s debut on the grandest of football stages.
Among a fan base that trumpets the parallel between a football club’s championship run and a storm-torn city’s rebirth, this trio and others like them have perhaps the most personal claims of connection between the Saints and recovery.
“I sure sat up as much as I could when he hit that field goal,” said Burt, 27, a Lake Charles native now at Touro Infirmary, as he recalled Garrett Hartley’s winning kick two weeks ago in the NFC title game. As for what one more win would mean, the father of two young Who Dats, the eldest named Drew, pondered the question. “I know the Saints are older than I am,” he said after a long silence. “I just don’t know how I’d take it, to tell you the truth.”
Bertucci, a 19-year-old who writes his half of conversations while a ventilator helps him breathe, attended most Saints home games during the past decade alongside his grandfather, mother and other family members. The malignancy found on his spine and in his brain last year made that impossible for this season, sending him instead to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and now back to Children’s Hospital in Uptown.
“It would make my year so much better,” he said of a Saints victory.
The walls around him were covered with newspaper clippings spanning the Saints’ season-opening win over the Detroit Lions to the overtime thriller over the Minnesota Vikings. He wore a “Who Dat” T-shirt that Sen. David Vitter had printed to mock the NFL’s efforts to block local merchants from profiting off the phrase. When Bertucci wasn’t writing, he held one of two footballs covered with the autographs of Saints players.
Quarterback Drew Brees recently paid him a surprise visit. “It was like a dream,” Bertucci said.
Down the hall, 12-year-old Micah’s room is decorated in the same theme, with the help of his mother Valetta and some timely visits from folks like Brees and his wife, Brittany, to running back Reggie Bush and his girlfriend Kim Kardashian.
Micah’s door features a printout of an online Twitter message in which Brees asks his contacts to “please pray for my friend Micah Roshell.” Brees posted the message on the morning of Roshell’s most recent bone marrow transplant.
“He’ll be watching Drew on Sunday, I can promise you,” Valetta Roshell said outside her son’s isolation room. Inside, Micah was resting after a biopsy that doctors ordered only weeks after having declared him cancer-free. With him is the game ball that Brees brought to him days after the Saints divisional playoff win over the Arizona Cardinals.
The boy, who came to New Orleans with his mother from Beauregard Parish after being diagnosed with leukemia three years ago, has parted with the football only for the few hours he spent in the operating room. “They came in to take him to surgery and he had it under the covers between his legs,” his mother said. He told the doctor “it is for good luck.”
Dr. Gregory Stewart, medical director at Tulane-Lakeside Hospital in Metairie, said it is clear to him that the morale boost the Saints have given to the New Orleans region is magnified in hospitals, nursing homes and rehabilitation centers.
Since October, the rehabilitation unit at Lakeside has thrown a game-watch party each Sunday for patients, most of them recovering from strokes or cardiovascular surgery. The routine this Sunday will be no different, with the floor’s physical therapy gym being transformed into something like a tailgate party.
Shannon Laiche, a nurse and rehab manager, said, “The patients talk about it all week.” ….
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