Infirmed: A Novel

By Lou DeCaro

This is the story about four men who find a way to overcome terrible obstacles in order to live a more productive and happier life. Infirmed will capture the readers attention from the very first page. Lou DeCaro has once again crafted a novel that is an absolute must read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543455472

Lou DeCaro

Lou DeCaro is the author of In The Dim Light Of The Day (Xlibris, November 2012), Marshmallow Dreams And Bitter Tangerines (Xlibris, October 2013), Anthony (Xlibris. January 2014), The Blind Eye of Love (Xlibris, October 2014), Once A Widow, Ever A Wife (Xlibris, January 2015), The Champion of Love (Xlibris, April 2015), Forever and a Day (Xlibris, August 2015), The Rose of Cuba (Xlibris, November 2015), The Writer of Lies (Xlibris}, January 2016), The Lonely and the Disabled (Xlibris, March 2016), Like Father, Like Son (Xlibris, July 2016), Maria (Xlibris, October 2016), The Pharaoh Club (Xlibris, January 2017), The Love Armada (Xlibris, May2017), Infirmed (Xlibris, October 2017), The Anger of Love (Xlibris, January 2018), A Moment in Time (Xlibris, March 2018), Johnny Reb's (Xlibris, May 2018), Jar of Broken Hearts (Xlibris, September 2018),Tears from the River of Love (Xlibris, September 2018),and False Love (Xlibris, June 2019).

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by Lou DeCaro.

ISBN:                  Softcover                  978-1-5434-5548-9

                          eBook                      978-1-5434-5547-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 09/29/2017

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

To Dale

CHAPTER 1

I GOT THE CALL one hour after I finished driving 1400 miles from Long Island to Port St. Lucie. It was my brother. He called to tell me he was in the hospital. Apparently, he had a heart attack, and was in a hospital near his home in New Jersey. Without any hesitation, I jumped into the shower, packed some clean clothes, and called a friend to drive me to the airport. It cost a small fortune to get a ticket to LaGuardia Airport. For the next 4 hours, all I did was pray he would be all right. Once I landed, I had to figure out how to get to his home town. I had to take a shuttle bus to a subway station in Queens, then take the subway to Penn Station in Manhattan. From there, I took a train down to his home town. Then I took a cab to the hospital.

When I walked into his room, he was sleeping. About ten minutes later, he opened his eyes and looked at me in disbelief. I told my brother I wasn’t a mirage. I came back because it was my obligation to do so. Our parents taught us to be loyal to each other. If either my brother or sister needed something, it was my duty to be there for them. You didn’t hesitate when a call for help came. Even though my brother told me I was crazy to come back, you could see the relief on his face that he was no longer alone. After all, he was always there for me when I needed help.

I couldn’t believe my ears when he told me he drove himself to the hospital. In a way that didn’t surprise me. My brother tends to be a little headstrong at times. Nevertheless, he took a risk I would not have taken in a million years. Then the frustration began. When he told me he had only been seen by one doctor in the last 24 hours, I knew it wouldn’t be long before he was going to demand to be transferred to another hospital. He had a personal friend who was one of the best cardiologists in the country. After sitting in the hospital for three days without anything being done with the exception of tests, my brother told me he had it with this hospital and put in a call to his friend. Within 24 hours, he was transferred to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Upper Manhattan. He was greatly relieved to be there. 6 days had passed before he was admitted to one of the finest heart hospitals in the country.

One by one, a battalion of heart specialists came into the room to examine my brother. Two days later, his friend performed the first of several angioplasties. The doctor found that my brother’s heart was operating at only 15 percent efficiency. Considerable damage was done to the muscle tissue. My brother was lucky to be alive.

CHAPTER 2

M Y BROTHER WAS in Room 151. It was located in a wing that had spectacular views of the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge. He was in a semi-private room, and encountered a variety of roommates during his 3 week stay. His room was in the middle of the wing, so you could see everyone come and go.

My brother was in a wing had 30 rooms and a centrally located nurse’s station. Every time I walked past it on my way to my brother’s room, I would say hello to everyone. I was particularly fond of one nurse who had to be 6 feet tall. She was very slender and had long golden-blonde hair. Her name was Jane. If I was 25 years younger and single, I would have asked her out in a heartbeat.

Still, my age didn’t prevent me from imagining I was her beau. I made sure I greeted her every day I came to visit my brother. In retrospect, my little fantasy helped me maintain my sanity during the 3 weeks my brother was in the hospital. I also got to know some of the nurses that attended to my brother on a daily basis. My brother was particularly fond of one nurse that came from the Philippines. Her name was Grace.

I also spent a lot of time in the Visitor’s Lounge on the Fifth Floor. It had a lot of vending machines. Some days I didn’t feel like driving back to my brother’s house in South Jersey, so I slept in the Visitor’s Lounge. But after a while, my back started to ache from sleeping in a chair, so I asked Jane if it would be possible to move a recliner into my brother’s room. The next day a brand new recliner was wheeled into Room 151.

I got a kick out of the Visitor’s Pass everyone had to get before they could visit their friends and loved ones. The pass resembled a corporate badge, and it included a photograph. It must have cost a fortune to produce one for every visitor every day. I accumulated 10 passes during my brother’s 3 week stay in the hospital. Some days the guards took the pass from me. Other days, I walked out of the hospital with the pass still pined to my chest.

I got to meet a lot of patients while helping out my brother in the hospital. Some of these patients didn’t have any visitors at all. These were the ones I made a special effort to meet. Most of these were there on an outpatient basis. That didn’t give me too much time to get to know them. Still, I was interested in their personal stories, and why they were in the hospital in the first place. Outpatient or not, their medical concerns were no less important than my brother’s. In my opinion, every patient had one thing in common. That one thing was fear.

CHAPTER 3

W HEN I SUFFERED my first heart attack in 2007, I wound up in a room next to the nurse’s station. Usually reserved for patients with special needs, I was intentionally put into this room so the nurses could keep a closer eye on me. That was necessary because I did a very foolish thing only 2 hours after my surgery. I decided to smoke a cigarette just outside of the main entrance.

There I was puffing away like a chimney with a security guard right after several stents were placed into my left anterior descending artery. Known as the widow maker, my LAD was completely closed. Thanks to Dr. Theo at St. Francis Hospital in Manhasett, New York, the artery was reopened. I felt as good as new.

But my cover was blown when one of the nurses from my floor walked up to me and asked me my name. When I told her my name, I was apprehended by a male nurse that was with her and escorted back to my room like a convict who had miserably failed his first escape attempt. I thought the whole episode was funny at the time, but as the years went by it became less humorous, especially when I looked at my brother sleeping in his hospital bed.

Actually in my case, it really wasn’t the doctor or the hospital that saved my life. It was my father. In January of that year, my father told me he wanted to go back to Japan to visit a man he befriended in Yokohama while serving in the U.S. Army as part of the Occupation Forces. This man was my father’s age, and he now lived just outside of Yokohama in the town of Chiba. I thought it was a great idea, and before more time passed, I took my father to get a new passport. We were all ready to go, but then my father suddenly became ill. He was diagnosed with mesothelioma in July, and was given only a couple of months to live.

CHAPTER 4

W HEN THE DOCTOR told me my father had only two months to live, he also told me the best thing I could do was to put my father in a nursing home to die. At first, I was angered by the suggestion, but then I realized where the doctor was coming from. He knew I had Parkinson’s disease, and didn’t think I could handle caring for my father 24 hours a day. The doctor was only trying to be honest.

But, the doctor didn’t realize I came from a family that put loyalty above everything else. The time had come to forgive my father, and do what I was obligated to do. He was my father, and despite the years of abuse, it was my moral responsibility to care for him. This was the time duty rose above everything else. Furthermore, whatever decision I made would remain with me for the rest of my life. The average person on the street would have said I was crazy, especially if these people knew what my father was like.

I didn’t think twice about my decision when the ambulance transported my father to my home. I knew it would be difficult. I had to do things like hand-feed my father like a baby, carry him from one room to the next, put him on and take him off the toilet, clean him up, sleep in a chair beside his bed every night, and anything else a person had to do for someone in my father’s condition. In short, I could not bring myself to do anything less. He was my father. He gave me life. My father once told me that when I was born I didn’t come with instructions or a certificate of entitlement. Once I made peace with my father, the abuse and beatings didn’t matter anymore. That realization made it easier for me to do what I had to do.

A few days before my father died, he looked at me and said he was proud of me. I finally heard the words I wanted to hear my entire life. Not long after, I had to put my father back into the hospital. While sitting next to him in his room, I suffered a heart attack. My left anterior descending artery was completely closed. The doctors