The story of the Las Vegas Fisher House actually dates to 1994, long before the Las Vegas VA hospital was even envisioned.
In late 1993, I injured myself while stationed at Castle Air Force Base in Atwater, Calif. After three months of various tests and physical therapy that didn’t help, I was taken out of my house on a backboard and transported to Bloss Memorial Hospital in Atwater. I was unable to move from the waist down due to excruciating pain, pain so severe that when the EMTs rolled me over, it felt as though they were ripping my leg out of my body.
The medical staff at Bloss gave me some pain meds that muted the pain just enough to have me transported back to Castle AFB Hospital, where I was told, “Well, Sgt. Moss, there’s nothing more that we can do for you.” I vividly remember that comment and replying back, “They shoot horses, don’t they? You have to do something.” That something was a two-hour ambulance ride to David Grant Medical Center at Travis AFB, just east of Sacramento, where I was admitted in January 1994.
My wife, Maria, was supposed to follow the ambulance to Travis, but was delayed getting back to the hospital after going home to pick up some personal items, and unbeknownst to me the ambulance left without her. Because she was a recent immigrant who had only been in America for three weeks, she didn’t know her way around, but she had a copy of directions to get to David Grant that the Emergency Room staff gave her. When she didn’t arrive at Travis as I expected, I was panicked and started calling everyone I knew to see if they heard from her; my mother in Las Vegas, my brother in Michigan, my supervisor at Castle AFB, the apartment complex manager. Nothing.
There was a retired soldier in my ward, at the time a California Highway Patrol Officer, who overheard the conversations. He took down the vehicle info and called his command to see if there were any reports of a crash in his sector, and when nothing came up they went so far as to check the entire state of California. Needless to say, I was thinking the worst. When word finally came back, the answer was both relieving and worrisome. There were no reports of a crash; Maria was simply lost in an area 500 times larger than anywhere she had ever lived.
As it turned out, heading north on CA-99, Maria missed the exit to I-80 and headed north, eventually merging onto the I-5. It wasn’t until she passed Reading, Calif., that she was turned around by some truck drivers who got her headed back in the right direction.
What should have been a two-hour drive took her 11 hours.
When she arrived at Travis, the sentry at the gate told her to go to the first traffic light and turn right, then to the second traffic light and turn right, and she would see the big building in front of her; that was the hospital. So in the darkness of Travis, she turned right at the first light, but when she got to the second light, she looked to the right and didn’t see the big building. Thinking she misheard what was said, she looked left and saw a big building. The sentry didn’t mention that the big building (David Grant) was about ½ mile down the road. So she turned left.
After passing the big building, which was an aircraft hangar, Maria was now driving around on the airfield among the cargo jets lined up on the tarmac. Almost immediately, multiple police cars surrounded her with guns and dogs, and when she got out of the car her first comment was “I need help.”
Really? I’m sure the Air Force Security Police realized that. Here was a woman with an Indonesian passport, driving on a German driver’s license, in a car with Michigan plates, driving around on the airfield at Travis AFB. Needing help was an understatement, but with the utmost professionalism the Travis SPs escorted her to the hospital.
Maria arrived in my room around 1:00 in the morning. Needless to say, I was relieved, but I was so doped up that I don’t recall much else. The next morning, Maria came in just about the time I was taken out for my first test. Throughout the day, I was in and out with various tests as they tried to figure out what was wrong with me, and Maria came in and out to see me. The next night went by, and when I woke up the doctors had finally found the right combination of meds to mute the pain to a point where I was actually, somewhat coherent. That’s when I asked her where she was staying. She replied, “In the car.”
I asked her “What do you mean in the car, why are you doing that?
Her reply, “I didn’t know where else to go.”
At that point, I knew that I had failed. I failed as an NCO, I failed as a man and worst, I failed my new wife. Here I was, unable to care for her; welcome to America, babe, now go sleep in the car.
I called the lodging office to get her a room, and was told that she wasn’t entitled to one, which didn’t go over very well with me. Needless to say, after being lost in California, I didn’t want her to leave the base again without me. After a lengthy and heated discussion, and a threat to crawl down there on my elbows and beat the living snot out of them if they didn’t give her a room, they gave her a room.
Several months later, during follow-up care for my back surgery at Travis, I picked up a brochure about this place called a Fisher House. I asked why nobody mentioned this place existed when I was admitted, and found out that it had not opened yet. Wanting to see what it was, I was able to get a tour of the Fisher House that was about to open. My understanding is that the Travis Fisher House was only the second one of its kind on an Air Force facility, and had my injury occurred just a few months later Maria would not have been sleeping in the car. I didn’t know who this Fisher guy was and didn’t really care, but my thoughts were that place was going to be a godsend for those of us unfortunate enough to require hospital care.
During subsequent travels in the Air Force and beyond, I have had the honor and privilege to visit Fisher Houses many time in various locations, including Landstuhl, Germany, and Fort Sam Houston, Texas, as well as the Veterans Guest House in Reno. The more I saw the intrinsic value of guest houses, the more committed I became to the cause. Every military and veterans hospital needs a safe place for our family members to go when our loved ones are in the hospitals.
When the Southern Nevada VA Hospital was being built, I had an opportunity to talk with John Bright, then director of the VA Southern Nevada Healthcare System, during a tour of the yet to be opened hospital and asked him if there were any plans for a Fisher House on the VA hospital campus. His answer was no. Because the Fisher House Foundation had already identified the Mike O’Callaghan Federal Hospital (MOFH) on Nellis AFB to host a Fisher House, there was no effort to build one at the VA hospital, nor justification as to why one was needed. The MOFH was a joint USAF/VA facility.
After doing some research, I found out that the majority of long-term patients were actually VA patients, and very few Air Force patients from outside the Las Vegas area were ever treated there. This was something that the Fisher House Foundation did not know when they listed Nellis with a documented need for a future house. With VA slated to move into its own hospital, much of the justification for Nellis Fisher House went away.
During a tour of the Community Living Center that had just been turned over to VA, I spoke with Bright again, explaining what I had found out, and convinced him to allocate some land for a guest house of some sort. I knew that we would have to work with the Fisher House Foundation at some point, but the first step was to allocate some land. Our U.S. Congresswoman, Shelley Berkeley, was also on the tour, and indicated that she would support that as well as she was one of the leading advocates for our hospital.
The chief of VA Voluntary Services, Dr. Roy Kakahuna, had established a committee called the VAVS Executive Committee, which was comprised of many of the movers and shakers in the Veterans community, who worked together to support the VAVS program outside the normal channels of the service organizations. This was a steering committee of sorts, which was able to work past the parochial issues that all service organizations have. The committee was instrumental in many of the programs that the VAVS program currently handles.
At one of our meetings, I told the story of my wife sleeping in the car, and proposed that the committee get behind this effort because of the location of the hospital and the large, rural area that the hospital supports. Kakahuna, Dr. Richard Small from the Vietnam Veterans of America, Mort Friedlander from the Jewish War Veterans, Bob Garlow from the VFW, Jim McCauley from the Catholic War Veterans and Bill Bauman from the DAV, among others, enthusiastically supported the idea, but we all realized the tall order it would be to bring this to fruition.
Because each organization has its own priorities, the logical thing to do was to stand up an independent foundation, beholden to nobody other than the cause it is created for, and the Nevada Veterans Foundation (NVF) was born. I approached my American Legion post (Paradise Post 149), to donate the seed money to cover initial expenses, such as corporate filing fees and fees to the IRS to apply for the tax exemption. With the help of Mr. Friedlander, who was a retired lawyer, we wrote the bylaws in such a way that within six months the NVF was operational with the tax-exempt approval of the IRS.
Friedlander and I spoke with the Fisher House Foundation to get an understanding on the process for getting a house built. They explained that there is no single factor in determining the priority, but they take into account the need, the location, the length of the construction season and the amount of money raised locally. However, if a community could show that they are dedicated enough to raise matching funds, the foundation would look favorably at moving up the house on the priority list. We had the land, now we just needed the money.
We live in an interconnected world, and the theory of six degrees of separation holds true. Because we all have mutual acquaintances, it was just a matter of time that the NVF was able to reach out to a member of the Nevada Military Support Alliance, an organization of some of Nevada's biggest movers and shakers, who pitched the idea that the community should come together and help fund this Fisher House. Through a series of gala events hosted by the Alliance, members of the community opened their hearts and their wallets to make this Fisher House a reality.
Along with the incredible generosity of the Fisher House Foundation, plus the generous contributions of many people within the Las Vegas area, groundbreaking on our Fisher House occurred on March 27, 2015. Some of the major contributors to the fundraising effort included The Engelstad Foundation, MGM Resorts International, The Heather and Jim Murren Foundation, Bigelow Aerospace, The Nevada Military Support Alliance, NV Energy, Nevada State Bank, Paragon Gaming, Wells Fargo and Barrick Mining.
As Perry Di Loreto, chairman of the Nevada Military Support Alliance said, “This is a significant occasion, and the Nevada Military Support Alliance is proud to have led the way. It is a true complement to the Southern Nevada community, and because of their generosity we were able to reach the local goal of $3 million dollars in a remarkably short period of time.”
And community support continues.
The Las Vegas Fisher House was built in the shortest amount of time of any Fisher House, from its date of inception to its opening day on Feb. 11, 2016. This alone is proof that one person’s idea can flourish into something tangible so we can all help each other.
At least in Las Vegas, no husband or wife, no parent or child, no loved one visiting another, will ever have to sleep in their cars because they didn’t know where else to go. God Bless Zachary and Elizabeth Fisher, and the entire Fisher House Foundation, for what they have done; touching more people in a time of need than can ever be counted.