Tracey was upstairs bathing the couple’s two children, Lily, then 5, and Riley, 2, when she got an uneasy feeling.
“The Lord just spoke to my heart and said, 'Say his name,’ ” Tracey recalled. “I turned off the water, went around the corner and yelled down, 'Ricky?’ I just heard a loud gasp, so I immediately ran downstairs.”
Tracey found her husband slumped over the couch in the throes of a grand mal seizure. She called 911, and the operator told her to put Ricky on the floor on his side.
By then she had two frightened, naked and soaking wet children by her side.
“He’s OK, mommy,” Lily kept telling her. “He’s squeezing my hand.”
But Ricky wasn’t OK. The seizure was causing the squeezing, and a few seconds later it stopped when he let out one large gasp before his breathing stopped.
“I’m looking at my kids and thinking their dad just died right in front of them,” Tracey said.
The 911 operator told Tracey to perform CPR. Fortunately, she and Ricky had taken a CPR class just a few years earlier when she was pregnant with Lily, “and it instantly kicked in.”
She got Ricky breathing again just before the paramedics arrived.
Tests would later reveal the seizure was brought on by a cancerous, grade three brain tumor. He needed brain surgery, then nine months of speech therapy and 14 months of radiation and chemotherapy.
Ricky’s memory and speech may never be the same as before. He fatigues easily and struggles with routine daily tasks.
But he has a lot of bath nights and basketball games and gymnastic meets ahead of him .
“She saved my life,” Ricky says with a smile and a nod toward Tracey. He gives her hand a squeeze, too. This time it means something.
Major support
When Ricky Stone arrived at spring training prior to his rookie season with the Houston Astros in 2002, he and his teammates listened to a presentation from the Baseball Assistance Team.
When the B.A.T. representative finished and asked the players to sign up for payroll deduction, Stone didn’t hesitate.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is something that could really help a family,' not knowing it would be mine one day,” Stone said.
Ricky’s revival in the ambulance gave Tracey hope, but another dreadful realization quickly flooded her mind. The family had no insurance.
“He made the Triple-A team out of spring training, but he was cut two weeks later,” Tracey said. “When you’re cut from the minor leagues, you lose your insurance immediately unless you’re on the 40-man (roster).
“We were in the process of getting private insurance, but Ricky had signed a two-month contract to pitch in Taiwan, and we were told the insurance wouldn’t have been any good over there.”
Ricky tore a hamstring a few days before he would have re-signed for another two months, so his Taiwanese club sent him home. That would turn out to be a blessing, because three weeks later the Hamilton High School graduate suffered the seizure in his own home instead of in a foreign country.
“Just like that, your world changes instantly,” Tracey said. “One day I’m worrying about what I’m gonna fix for dinner that night, and the next day I’m trying to find somebody to perform brain surgery.”
News of Ricky’s brain cancer spread so rapidly that Houston’s Roy Oswalt, who had just pitched the Astros to a 7-4 win against the Reds at Great American Ball Park the night of the seizure, drove to Mercy Hospital in Fairfield to visit Ricky and Tracey after the game.
Two days later, Tracey got a phone call from Jim Martin, then the executive director of B.A.T., who told her, “We’ve had so many phone calls from players in the past day telling us we need to help your family, so what can we do?”
The organization set up a medical fund, to which players from all 32 Major League Baseball teams donated. B.A.T. also bought insurance for the family, made the mortgage payment for their Fairfield Twp. home, sent a monthly allowance for spending on whatever they needed and, once Ricky started flying to the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for monthly treatments, took care of all travel costs.
“I remember him donating to B.A.T. when he was playing, but at the time I had no idea what it was,” Tracey said. “It’s really an amazing organization, and it’s for anyone in the baseball family at all. Office staff, grounds crew, if you’re affiliated with baseball in any way, they will help you.”
Brain surgery removed 90 percent of the tumor, known as anaplastic oligodendroglioma, and radiation and chemo treatments over the next 14 months took care of the remaining 10 percent.
The tumor and seizure also affected Ricky’s memory and speech, resulting in a condition known as aphasia, where he knows what he wants to say but just can’t get the words to come out. And he wasn’t allowed to drive for six months, which really made things rough with Tracey teaching prekindergarten three mornings a week and going to class to earn her master’s degree two nights a week. Plus, there were the speech therapy classes three days a week and three-day trips to Houston every other month.
“It was mass chaos,” Tracey said. “Without his parents and my mom and my niece and everybody pitching in and helping out with the kids, I don’t know what we would have done.”
Ricky is driving again. He’s also talking, remembering and laughing. He’s not 100 percent back to where he was, and he may never be. But he’s OK with that.
While he loved playing professional baseball, where he tied a MLB record for most appearances by a rookie pitcher (78) in 2002, these days he’d much rather toss pitches to Riley or watch Lily’s gymnastic meets.
“Baseball will always be a part of me, but I don’t miss it,” he said. “I like to read the Bible and spend time with my family. That’s the most important thing, because without them, I don’t have anything.”
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2193 or jmorrison@coxohio.com.
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