“How are you still alive?”
His answer: “Hell, I don’t know. It just wasn’t my time.”
He said they basically all told him the same thing: “We don’t know how anyone should have survived that.
“It’s a miracle!”
While a heavenly hand may well have reached down for Grote21 months ago, it’s certain he survived because earthly arms extended outward for him. That’s how someone donates blood. They stick their arm out for the phlebotomist.
And Grote is here because a lot of people donated the blood that saved him during a cataclysmic medical emergency where his family was called in, he was given last rites, and his wife Becky was pulled aside and asked if Bob had his final affairs in order.
Over a decade and a half ago, Grote was diagnosed with a hereditary autoimmune disease that led to hepatitis and was further complicated by slow acting Primary Biliary Cirrhosis (PBC). Since then, he’d had only one flare up in 2021.
But then came the incident that nearly killed him.
As Grote was bleeding out at Kettering Medical Center — blood streaming from his mouth, his nose, his rectum; his stomach filled with blood, his bed filling with blood until it spilled over and pooled on the floor — doctors tried a Hail Mary procedure and drilled a hole in his tibia so they could pump blood back into him as fast as possible.
He would receive 31 units of blood here — almost the amount found in four people’s bodies.
Dr. Richard McKenzie, working over three hours in the most adverse conditions amidst the continued flow of blood and other bodily fluids, managed to put a stent in his liver to drain off some of the blood, but two days later Grote began to bleed out again.
He finally was flown to the UC Medical Center by helicopter.
Unconscious and on a ventilator, he had tubes going down into his stomach with inflated balloons on the ends of them to press against the numerous bleeds there.
The pilot had no helmet for him, so a Kettering Hospital nurse fitted him with her daughter’s softball catcher’s mask which helped keep the tubes from moving.
At UC he was met by Dr. Lulu Zhang, a vascular and interventional radiology specialist, or, as he calls her:
“My hero. She saved my life.”
At UC — as Dr. Zhang pulled off her medical magic by inserting coils in the arteries that bled to stop the blood flow — Grote received more units of blood.
After being given so much, he is now trying to give back the best way he knows how.
For the second year in a row, he — along with so many people in the community, especially the Versiti Blood Center in downtown Dayton and Wright State University — is helping put on the Bob Grote Blood Drive this Saturday at the Nutter Center.
The Versiti mobile donor van will be in Parking Lot 2 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m, for people to stop and donate blood. Other donors can go to the Versiti Blood Center at 349 S. Main Street in Dayton this week and donate in Grote’s name.
Call 937-461-3220 to set up an appointment to donate.
Wright State’s first pro athlete
You wouldn’t think, especially at age 70, that Grote could pull off any more memorable feats under the Wright State banner than he already did nearly a half century ago.
A star in basketball and baseball, he became the school’s first pro athlete when — after turning down contracts to play professional basketball in Europe — he was drafted and signed with the New York Mets and pitched in their organization for four years.
Later he helped recruit and coach the Raiders’ 1983 Division II National Championship basketball team. He coached baseball at WSU, too, and then was a color commentator for WSU basketball broadcasts.
In 1987, he was enshrined in Wright State’s Athletic Hall of Fame.
That’s a heady resume. He helped WSU win a lot of games and titles and his name is forever etched in the school’s record book.
But it’s more meaningful helping to save lives.
And that’s the bottom line of the blood drives.
As Cora Johnson of Versiti noted recently: The local blood supply is at a critical level.
Last year’s blood drive collected 80 units of blood — a local, one-day record Grote said.
This year — with the assistance of people like WSU baseball coach Alex Sogard, his team, and Raider baseball alumni helping to get the word out — Grote hopes the drive can match last year’s success.
‘I lived because other people gave’
On that April morning in 2023, Grote had just finished breakfast with his wife — Becky Grimes, the former WHIO-TV reporter, anchor and producer — when he started vomiting blood.
He quickly was rushed to Kettering Medical Center and was lying in bed, awaiting tests, when he felt he was about to throw up again. Tethered to tubes, he couldn’t reach the call button to summon a nurse, so he forced himself to turn onto his side.
That move, he said, saved his life because he began to violently bleed out:
“If I had stayed on my back, I would have drowned in my own blood.”
Nurses told him he had angels looking over him.
Eventually, doctors discovered varices, abnormally dilated veins had “exploded,’ as Grote put it, in his stomach.
Once under Zhang’s care, he began to improve quickly and was released from UC within a week. Before the incident he had 212 pounds on his 6-foot-4 frame. Because of fluid build-up, he left the hospital at 258. One of his front teeth was broken off during one of his four intubations.
Eventually, he returned to his old fitness routines and soon began to look and act like the old Bob, at least on the outside.
On the inside he said he had “survivor’s remorse.”
“I kept asking myself: ‘Why was I the one who got to live?’
The question that perplexed him has fascinated Dr. Zhang as well he said:
“When I met with her recently she said: ‘It’s hard for me to understand you.’
“I asked what she meant, and she said that 99 out of 100 of her patients — with me being the exception — have trouble walking from the door to the chair (in the exam room.)
“She said, ‘You’re walking four miles a day and lifting weights and constantly doing stuff. People with chronic liver disease like you have, we don’t see this.’
“She said it was hard for her to wrap her head around that and how aggressive I was in my rehab.
“I told her I believed if I hadn’t been doing all this for years, I wouldn’t have survived to even get to her.
“And I said, ‘I’m not going to give up on that. If something else would happen — God forbid — I’ve got give myself a chance to survive, That’s the only thing I got left.’
“And yet, for all of that — what I do, what Dr. Zhang and the other medical people have done — if it wasn’t for people donating blood, none of that would matter.
“If it wasn’t for people’s generosity, for their love of each other, I would not have made it.
“If there had been 25 units of blood available, not 31, I wouldn’t be here.
“Just think of that. Could there be a worse scenario?
“You have a loved one in surgery — in a real emergency situation — and the doctor comes out and says, ‘We could really have helped, but we don’t have enough blood to continue.’
‘I was so lucky and that was heavy on my mind.”
That’s when a friend in Cincinnati — not only where he’d been saved, but where he’d grown up and starred at Elder High — suggested he lend his name to a blood drive there. The effort was a success and collected 50 units.
He then wanted to do the same thing in the Dayton area and reached out to Ken Herr, the longtime official scorer and, before that, clock and scoreboard operator, at WSU basketball games.
Herr is also a hall of fame blood donor, having given over 150 units of blood in his lifetime. He helped Grote connect with the Solvita Blood Center last year. This year the center is run by Versiti.
While the drive carries his name, Grote stressed: “It’s not about me. I’m just the messenger.”
“But I also feel I’m the luckiest guy in the world. I lived because other people gave.”
Now he wants others to be able to say the same thing.
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