Tom Archdeacon: Former Flyer Nate Green loses a love 'like no other'

Oct. 22—TROY — The doctor's heart-sinking question — just four words — left Nate Green reeling.

The former Dayton Flyers basketball stalwart had just made the half-hour drive from an area hospital to his family's home along a cornfield-flanked country road southwest of Troy.

His two daughters, 9-year-old Ariana and 16-year-old Tatyana, had decorated the front of house for Halloween — with everything from a purple and green witch and a massive, white web filled with spiders to bloody handprints on the garage and an "Enter If You Dare" sign on the front door — to surprise their mom when she came home from the hospital.

Becca Green had gone into the hospital six days earlier for what Nate said they thought was a "routine procedure" to unclog a stent in a blood vessel in her leg and add another in hopes of alleviating the worsening effects of lupus that had left his wife with "blood clot issues."

"Halfway through the procedure they had to stop because she'd tensed up and blocked her airway," Green said. "They put her on a ventilator and thought that was going to be the last time I'd see her.

"They told me I should hold her hand in those last moments and asked if I wanted a chaplain.

"I was like 'Whaaat?'

"I held her hand that whole night and told her how much I'd always loved her."

This was the girl — she was Rebecca McMillin then — he'd met when he was a 6-foot-6, 245-pound sophomore starter for the Flyers and she was a freshman nursing student at Sinclair Community College after being a cheerleader at Troy High School.

That had been 23 years ago, and they'd been in love since.

"We were like two peas on a pod," he said quietly.

Through the night, things "miraculously" changed for his 42-year-old wife, he said: "She was off the ventilator in less than 24 hours. The next day nurses couldn't believe she was sitting there.

"But there was still the main issue they had to finish. They thought she'd tensed up because they'd only done a twilight (sedation), so this time they were going to control her breathing and completely sedate her. And instead of just fixing one stent and adding another, they were going to do a bypass surgery to alleviate the problem."

Green said on Oct. 2, the night before the surgery, a nurse informed them the doctor who was supposed to operate was "not going to be able to, but his partner was doing it.

"Becca felt comfortable with the original doctor, but she said, 'I can't take the pain anymore. I can't live like this, so we're going to put it in God's hands and go ahead with it.'

"And when they were done, a doctor came in and said the procedure went well. They'd done the bypass and added a stent near her waist. They said they were keeping her on the ventilator for precautionary reasons until morning and then I could come see her. So I said, 'Alright, I'm going home and taking a shower.'"

Some 40 minutes later Green said he got the doctor's call — and question — that left him numb:

"Are you sitting down?"

Green suddenly felt himself in freefall: "'Whoa! ... What's going on? ... You said everything went well.'

"He told me they tried to move her off the OR table to her bed and she had difficulty breathing and they lost her heart rate. He told me they did CPR and brought her back for 10 or 15 minutes and then they lost her again.

"And this time they couldn't bring her back.

"This time, she'd died.

"I just kept saying, 'How could this happen?'"

Overwhelmed with shock and grief and so many questions, he also now had myriad responsibilities.

Besides his two young daughters, he has a stepson, 24-year-old Devon Larger, whose fiancé, Delaney Roswell, just had their baby girl, Deliah.

Green also is caring for his 93-year-old grandmother, Vashti Love, who he'd brought from back home in Maryland so she wouldn't be sent to a nursing home.

"Becca pushed the idea, but really it was a whole family decision," he said. "Tatyana gave up her bedroom for Grandma and moved into a back room we had."

The 44-year-old Green recounted all this the other afternoon when I went to visit him after talking to two of his former UD teammates, Brooks Hall, and Keith Waleskowski.

They both told me he was really struggling.

"Understandably so," Waleskowski said. "He's worried about his kids, as any father would be. He knows they're going to be really missing their mother."

As we spoke, Green first excused himself to take a call about his finances and then came a call from a Cincinnati lawyer who's trying to help him get answers.

Green said the coroner informed him Becca's death was attributed to "natural causes," a finding he'd also like explained.

Until then, he said he must wait to adhere to his wife's wishes for cremation. After that, he can plan a memorial service.

Along with those issues, there's the overload of daily tasks. "Life doesn't just stop because of all this," he said quietly. "Every day I want to cry and go in a corner and not come out, but I have responsibilities. I have people counting on me."

And so, during our conversation he stopped to make his grandmother a chicken salad sandwich for lunch. At 2:40 he'd go pick up Tatyana at Troy High School and 50 minutes later he'd do the same with Ariana at her middle school.

In days past, he'd taken her to cheerleading practice and, in the mornings, he'd fixed her hair into "a nice ponytail."

That night he was making dinner: "Fried chicken tenders, green beans and corn."

"I can't cook like my wife, but I'm OK," he shrugged.

In front of him a large, framed photo of Becca was propped up against some boxes on the floor.

"That's from our last getaway in Cincinnati," he said. "It was just a month or so ago. I had the whole day planned. We went on a (Ohio) river cruise and out to dinner.

"My sister-in-law blew this photo up and when she gave it to me, I just cried."

He grew silent and when you looked over, you saw the tears rolling down his cheeks.

'My protector, my bodyguard'

Few former Flyers players have a more meaningful story than Green, who UD coach Oliver Purnell recruited out of St. Vincent Pallotti High School in Laurel, Maryland.

Soon after Green got to Dayton, his UD career nearly ended before he ever played a game.

"When I was a kid, I was a problem child," he once told me. "I almost didn't graduate because I was so unruly.

"Freshman year I came to UD with that street mentality. I thought that lifestyle was going to work here. I was wrong."

On an October night in 1998, a few Flyers players got into an altercation with another student at a Student Ghetto party and Green punched the guy on two occasions.

The other student pressed charges. Green admitted his involvement and was convicted of one count of misdemeanor assault.

He got two years' probation, did community service at a local soup kitchen, completed a pair of court-required rehab programs and was suspended for two games. He also went through what he called "a scared straight program ... that worked" at London Correctional Institution.

"UD was about family, and they were supportive," he said. "They felt I'd made a mistake but could learn from it and change.

"I told Coach Purnell, 'If I can get through this, I'll make it my mission to help other kids.' I promised to do my best every chance I got."

And he lived up to that promise.

After a shoulder injury limited his freshman season to six games before redshirting, he had four productive years and played in 133 games, tied for eighth most in UD history.

Although often wrapped like a mummy to fortify his two shoulders which regularly dislocated, he started 61 games, averaged. 6.2 points and still draws praise from his teammates.

"You just hung your head in practice when you heard your name opposite Nate's and you were on defense," Waleskowski said. "You knew it was going to be a long day ... and it was going to hurt."

Hall, the star of those Flyers' teams back then, called Green: "My protector, my bodyguard."

Green graduated with a criminal justice and communications management degree and had a sociology minor.

He played several years of pro ball in Austria, Luxembourg, Ecuador, Argentina, Mexico, the CBA and with the Dayton Jets.

Once his hoops career ended, he began working with troubled, abused, and neglected kids in the Miami Valley.

"I do it because I can relate to some of these kids," he said the other day. "I struggled when I was young. It took my high school and college coaches and other people to guide me.

"The UD community helped me become who I am, and this is my way of giving back and helping kids from going down the wrong path."

He spent nearly 12 years working in Troy, as a youth leader at a juvenile rehab center and as a case specialist at a foster care agency.

For the past four years and four months he's been a youth specialist — and now a CPR and first aid instructor, too — at the Nicholas Residential Treatment Center on Infirmary Road in Dayton.

Until 18 months ago he said he — and some college guys he brought in — would play basketball with the 13- to 18-year-old kids he works with at Nicholas. That's when he suffered his second torn Achilles.

"I still shoot with them and let them know I still got the juice," he smiled. "And I try to take the kids to see UD games every now and then so they can see a different avenue to go down.

"A lot of them haven't been beyond the block they live on, much less to UD Arena. They don't have any idea about the possibilities there are in life."

'We were the perfect team'

Nate and Becca met at the Asylum, a now closed dance club on Patterson Blvd. in downtown Dayton.

"I was trying to find a ride home and we had a mutual friend who had a car," he said.

"As they were giving me a ride, I looked at Becca and said 'You're a hottie! Can I get your number?'

"Her friend told her, 'He plays basketball at UD.' And she said, 'Yeah, so?'

"She didn't follow sports and didn't care what I did. I liked that. She ended up liking me for me and not for where I played.

"But she played me at first. I called her the next day for a date, and she said she was busy. And I said, 'Well I'm not giving up that easy.'"

He finally took her on a first date — to Red Lobster — and as he puts it now, "then we just never stopped,"

She ended up coming to UD games and even joining him on some of his overseas basketball stops.

She worked as an LPN at Hospice, and then at a Troy nursing home.

After a decade together they finally married Oct. 9, 2010.

"We complemented each other perfectly," he said. "We were the perfect team. What she couldn't do, I could; and what I couldn't do, she was great at. She added the spice I needed in life. She added the guidance, the focus.

"And I just added the love. I just loved her like no other. She was my heart."

His eyes brimmed over again.

Hall, who went to high school with Becca, knew her well: "She was a beautiful person, kind and caring, but also direct. You didn't have to guess what she was thinking. And she was very serious about her children. She was just a great, great mom. And she was awesome for Nate."

The lupus — an autoimmune disease in which the body's immune system mistakenly attacks healthy tissues in many parts of the body — took a toll on her in recent years.

Green said there was concern she could lose her legs. He told how it might take her 20 minutes to get out of bed.

"But she tried not to miss anything with the kids," he said. "She was a cheerleading coach, and the kids all loved her."

Since Becca's death, Green said he's heard from his high school teammates and coaches and several of the Flyers he played with, especially Cain Doliboa.

Another friend started a GoFundMe page to help with the growing expenses he now faces.

"He does so much good as a social worker, but I don't think he makes a ton of money that way," Waleskowski said. "I'm sure he can use the help."

Along with the GoFundMe page, Green can be reached by email: nate.green03@yahoo.com.

He doesn't like asking for help but admitted: "One thing that really helps me is just an encouraging word when I'm feeling down. It makes me think, 'I can do this. I have to. My daughters, my grandmother, they're counting on me. I've got to step up."

Once again, he has to be the protector.

Once again, he has to live up to that promise to Oliver Purnell:

He's got to do his best.