I am not sure exactly how this happened by my whole immediate family somehow all relocated from New York to California. It’s not like there are a lot of Italians here, like the neighborhood I grew up in, mostly Italian and of course the heart of which was the local parish. But at the time I do believe it was fairly common. I used to joke that there were no native Californians, everyone I met came from someplace else.

So while living it up in Sunny Southern California my father was sick and needed surgery. I was starting my own business at the time so my siblings took up a collection and I was selected to go to New York to be with our father. When I got to the hospital my mother was there and my father was still in surgery.

It seemed like it took forever but I think I was there for about 4 hours and the surgeon came to talk to us. It was like a scene from M.A.S.H. without stopping to change or even clean up at all we talked to the doctor, he looked more like a butcher well decorated with lots of blood and his mask still around his neck. He described the procedure that was designed to save my dad’s life. This procedure is called a Colostomy because the colon is removed and the opening that they connect the end of the colon to is called a stoma. Since my father would be in recovery for the rest of the night we would return the next day.

The next day I saw my dad, the first time in several years, he was standing up in his hospital room leaning heavily on an IV stand. I was shocked there was the tough old man looking like an escaped inmate from a concentration camp. Well he recovered completely and having foolishly outlived most of his friends and family decided to do what most other New Yorkers do; Inhabitants of the Big Apple who survive don’t pass away, they move, mostly to Florida.

I did inherit some great things from my father a cleft in my chin and I like to think a strong jaw line. He also had very large appetites and like him I have always wanted to squeeze the most out of life. I did get his rotten plumbing. My dad started having digestive issues just before he turned 70, I was 35. I have read about people being diagnosed with UC or Crohn’s  while still children so I was kind of lucky.  To be Continued…

CS