CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) - Apparently, it’s no simple task to figure out NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s email address.
Just ask Lyn Aborn.
“I tried a bunch of different permutations … but it kept bouncing back,” says Aborn, an emergency medicine physician in Redwood City, California. “So I decided to go old-fashioned. I typed out the letter, I signed it, I hand-addressed the envelope to Commissioner Goodell at the NFL headquarters in New York City, and sent it in the mail. And I remember my husband making fun of me. He’s like, ‘No one’s ever gonna read that.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s the price of a stamp. So why not?’”
Turns out someone did read it. Maybe not Goodell himself, but that doesn’t much matter. What matters is Aborn and her team are now Super Bowl-bound.
That team, by the way, is made up of a group of ER doctors who bonded over their medical training and football watching while doing their residency together at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, and who - since completing the program and starting their medical careers in 2005 - have made good on a pact to have an annual reunion.
The get-together has always been on Super Bowl weekend. And they’ve always watched the game on TV.
This year’s edition of their reunion, however, will be in Tampa, Florida, where the 10 doctors - who still can’t quite believe this is happening - will get to watch the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Super Bowl LV from inside Raymond James Stadium. They’ll be among approximately 7,500 vaccinated health care workers who received free tickets from the NFL as a thank-you for their service during the pandemic.
For these 10, obviously, the NFL’s gift will help each of them check something huge off of their bucket lists. None of them has ever been to a Super Bowl. It has also represented a surefire way to get 100% participation at one of their reunions for the first time since any of them can remember, and will serve as a great chance for them all to celebrate their friendships with and support of one another over the years.
But there’s something else the opportunity is providing for members of the group:
Hope.
‘ALL 10 OF US GOT ALONG’
They started as interns together in 2002, and as such, they would be a part of the end of a bygone era.
Back then, as had been the case for generations, doctors in training slogged through a brutal boot camp, often working 100-plus hours a week at a hospital - at times becoming so depleted that they would fall asleep during shifts.
“It’s a pretty tough time where you’re working 130-plus hours a week, you’re relying on your residency intern class to kind of cover for you - you know, you’re giving each other your pets to pet-sit … it’s a really tough point in your life,” says Manoj Pariyadath, who is now an emergency medicine physician at Wake Forest Baptist Health in Winston-Salem. “So you really gel with the people in your class. And we just happened to have a class where all 10 of us got along.”
(In 2003, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education imposed new rules limiting residents to an average workweek of 80 hours and to a maximum of 30 hours of work at a stretch.)
They also happened to all enjoy, during the NFL season, spending a good deal of their precious time away from the hospital gathered around a TV watching a game in each other’s company. The fellow residents gathering at the end of every season to watch the Super Bowl, then, was kind of just a natural occurrence.
But as their training days wound to a close, they all agreed to make it an intentional excuse to reconnect.
Recalls Jill Antoniazzi, now an emergency medicine physician at Atrium Health’s Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte: “We were all taking positions across the country - in California and Texas, South Carolina, different parts of North Carolina - but we really wanted to keep our tight-knit relationship going. So we decided that we needed to have an annual reunion … and we decided that Super Bowl was the perfect weekend because, No. 1, we’re huge football fans.
“Also, as ER doctors, we work weekends, nights, and we knew that we would be able to just, you know, request that weekend off (since the date is set so far in advance). … And although it’s sort of a holiday in this country, it’s not something that usually comes along with family obligations.”
It would prove to be a plan built to last.
MAINTAINING A SUPER TRADITION
In the 15 years since they all scattered, there’s been a reunion every year on Super Bowl weekend.
Typically a few members of the group haven’t been able to make it - because of weddings or births, that kind of thing. One of the original members never really participated, but just a couple of years after they completed the program, Antoniazzi started bringing her significant other, Nilesh Patel, (now her husband, also an emergency medical physician at Atrium), and the group now considers him an honorary member of their intern class.
Traditionally, they rent a big house instead of getting hotel rooms so they can maximize their time together. They’ve also taken to cooking a huge meal on Sunday that celebrates the cuisines of the cities represented in the Super Bowl. On several occasions, they’ve brought in spouses and children and made it a family affair.
The reunion often has taken place in the Carolinas, as that’s where seven of the 10 - also including Jayne Kendall in Charlotte, Jen Hannum in Winston-Salem, Heston LaMar in Wilmington, and Dave French in Charleston, South Carolina - are based.
But they also have gone out West, with past get-togethers happening in Austin; Napa Valley; Portland (where group member Erin Kuniholm lives); San Francisco; Santa Fe (where group member Pat Craddock lived before moving to Colorado); Sedona, Arizona; and, last February, Las Vegas.
In fact, for the ones who were able to attend, the Vegas trip was their last time on an airplane. Not long after that, COVID turned their lives at work upside down.
If there’s been any sort of upside to the pandemic for these 10, though, it’s this: Since March, they’ve been in closer regular contact than they’ve been in since their residency.
“In the last year there’s obviously been a ton of activity on our group text,” says Kendall, a regional vice president for US Acute Care Solutions who also works ER shifts at various Atrium hospitals in the Charlotte area. “At the beginning we were going back and forth, like, ‘What kind of face mask does your hospital have? Do you have enough face masks?’ And then it was, ‘What is the latest that you’re hearing about the treatment of this?’”
“We actually had a couple of Zoom happy hours that we did, to just talk. We all trained together, we all know emergency medicine, we’re all seeing this unravel in front of us … so it was very cool to have a group of people that you feel tight and connected with and can say whatever you think and feel, throughout what’s been a really tough year. It’s been very cathartic.”
Then one day in mid-December, the group text lit up with a piece of interesting news: The NFL was weighing the possibility of inviting vaccinated health-care workers to the Super Bowl.
Almost immediately, Lyn Aborn started trying to track down Roger Goodell’s email address.
‘WE WERE DUMBFOUNDED’
“My friends are not ones to broadcast their sacrifices,” Aborn wrote in her letter to the NFL’s commissioner, dated Dec. 18.
“It is, after all, what we signed up for. But it has been a stressful year. And we deserve some fun and a chance to be around those who have supported us and experienced the same pressures that this past year has brought upon us.”
After having no success finding his email contact info, she added her own to the bottom of her letter, printed it out, signed it, then wrote Goodell’s name and the address for the NFL’s offices - 345 Park Ave, New York, NY, 10154 - on an envelope and waved off her husband’s teasing as she dropped it in the mail.
About a week and a half later, she received an email from an NFL employee, who thanked her for her service and said the league was still figuring out a plan for honoring health-care workers. Aborn figured the NFL had received tons of similar pleas, and that they were sending the same response to everyone who’d reached out.
But in mid-January, a second email came. This time, the NFL was offering all 10 of them free tickets to the Super Bowl.
“We were dumbfounded,” Aborn says. “I mean, I can imagine the amount of mail they must get at the NFL. So the fact that somebody read the letter, and that it actually manifested in this incredible opportunity, it kind of blows my mind. … I’m very grateful. Sometimes I guess a good old-fashioned letter does the trick.”
It’s not known how many of the 7,500 vaccinated health-care workers who received free tickets from the NFL are like this group of ER doctors - i.e. health-care workers who reached out and made individual cases for the tickets. The NFL did not respond to emails. (Perhaps we should have mailed a letter?)
They’re almost certainly in a select category, though. According to the NFL’s website, the majority of the 7,500 work in hospitals and health-care systems in the Tampa and central Florida area, while all 32 NFL organizations were able to select just four vaccinated health-care workers from their communities to attend.
In any event, the 10 doctors realize how lucky they are.
“This is an unplanned but very amazing blessing for our group to get together,” says Manoj Pariyadath, who pointed out that the plan prior to the gift from the NFL was to do a reunion with just the East Coasters in Wilmington this weekend. “We’ve always talked about at some point having one of our reunions at a Super Bowl. But as the years go by, that probably gets less tenable as we have more kids and the expenses go up. … So the fact that it is happening is really cool.”
And the trip, for all of them, also symbolizes something even bigger than their bond as friends.
“For many weeks and even months,” Antoniazzi says, “there was this understanding that things were gonna get worse before they were gonna get better, so you were just sort of in brace mode. And between the media, and work, and kids not being in school, there was really essentially no escape. At every turn in life it seemed like it (the pandemic) was what was present, and being in the profession we are, you talk about it at work, you end up talking about it at home.
“So this has really been just a hopeful moment. It’s something that gives you this sense that, OK, maybe we are going to be able to get back to some semblance of normalcy at some point.”
“It’s a real sense,” she says, “of hope.”
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