I just got out of a very tough nursing home known as Camelot Arms in a little corner of Youngstown, Ohio, known as “Cornersburg”. It looks quaint enough for a little corner lot of a distressed Rust Belt city still rusting. Camelot Arms is a no-nonsense treatment center that is known for whipping the most pathetic cases of physical unfitness back into some semblance of staying power and physical wherewithal.
And I am fed up with it all. I published my eighth literary work on the Smashwords publishing engine yesterday. I got a ring-a-ling-a-ling back that my work needs more work for it to be able to go out to online retailers, wholesalers and libraries. So it looks like I’ll be working on Easter, too. I’ve already given the go-ahead for another online book company to make A Stranger in this town an audiobook and Smashwords wants it to be transformed into a work in which a reader can click on the title of a poem in the Poem Index and it will shoot right to the poem. Young people love this rigmarole and so do I. A Manhattan agent situated high in a skyscraper gave me the go-ahead since they’re not interested in the work so much since they don’t handle poetry, just genre’ fiction.
Every night at Camelot Arms, I would go out and have a cigarette. For those of us who were considered “safe smokers,” we enjoyed the freedoms of having a cig whenever we darned well wanted to smoke one of those dragonbreathing nasties. Dino, who has been a “non-safe smoker” for eons now, oftentimes would come out and ask me for a smoke and most of the time I’d answer, “No, Dino, you’re a non-safe smoker and they even make you wear a bib when you smoke. Do you think I’ll let you have a smoke when I know I’ll lose my smoking privileges as a safe smoker?”
So one night in the middle of a cold, miserable January or February, Dino comes out and says, “You better wake up and get inside. You’ll freeze to death out here.”
“The heck with that, Dino, give me a cigarette,” I replied, which he did.
All kidding aside, Camelot Arms is a great place if you smoke cigarettes. For many, it’s the only place since it is one of the few nursing homes/physical and occupational therapy homes that accepts Medicare with a fast-track program into Medicaid. And it has a loving attitude toward those who have served in the U.S. military (I was in U.S. Army ROTC for two years at the Univ. of Akron), along with old, archaic, dinosaur jocks like Dino and I.
Camelot Arms, under a new corporate entity now, used to be part of a monster nursing home conglomerate known as Atrium Health Care, or something of that nature. Now it’s under new administrative management, but from what I hear, still allows its staff and patients smoking rights. There are plenty of dances and parties, and they are sort of fun. They also have a great activities department and Harriet and her gang are always keeping up to date with things to do and places to see. Going on bus trips to the dollar stores in town, visiting an art museum, and the old stand-by, bingo, are on the schedule weekly. Members of the cloth, like J.B. and Rev. Tensley, visit weekly for inspirational and spiritual aid and comfort. And overall, the aides are great folks. Most are African-American and Latino but really enjoy whooping it up with the cowboys and cowgirls at Camelot Arms.
The smoking tent is built in the middle of a big commons area situated inside the center of the building. It is an open air sort of commons and the smoking tent is covered with thick plastic. It was a cold Ohio winter this year and I think I might have got bitten by frostbite, but I don’t know, I haven’t lost any digits on my feet or hands, and I smoked quite a bit over the winter. There is even a rumor that Camelot Arms was once a Revolutionary or a Civil War fort. I don’t know, who knows?
I am not a Christmas and Easter Roman Catholic. The only times I don’t go to mass, normally, are during this season and the Christmas season. I am even a Eucharistic minister at a church in nearby Austintown, where I live.
I have been sick almost constantly for nearly two years. Really. I have a lot of catching up to do, I’ve never been married, do not have an “immediate family” of my own for this reason, and I don’t get much support from my Mother, who is nearly 90, nor my siblings and their families since they have problems of their own. I’ll turn 60 in December. Right after my 58th and my 59th birthdays, I ended up with heart attacks. Mea culpa. My fault, my fault, it’s all my fault. Really. I’m not saying this to be snarky, cute, or clever, I just mean it, that’s all.
I don’t chew nicotine gum, suck on nicotine lozenges, and smoke full flavored cigs anymore. Often, doing two of these things on the same day, with some minor alterations for the rest of the week, month and year.
I think this is one of the main reasons why I suffered both heart attacks. I now have a pacemaker and a defibrillator installed in my heart. At the time of the surgery, my heart was so weak I had to have the surgery without being put under, with only a local anesthetic to keep the pain away.
My heart doctor at East Liverpool City Hospital in East Liverpool, Ohio, and another at Trumbull Memorial Hospital in Warren, Ohio, both informed me that my heart is near 100% capacity. Right after my surgery, a distinguished looking guy riding the elevator with two orderlies and myself remarked, “Heart medicine and care has come a long way. Two or three decades ago, there would have been no means to help you.”
Yes, i am very grateful. My long deceased father, who died when I was 22 years old, always said, “When Sam is getting better after recovering from a health ailment, he always gets ornery again. Ha ha ha. My Mom and my siblings agreed. It’s sad, Dad died of an inoperable aneurysm in his own ticker when he was a little more than two years older than what I am right now. I’m roughly 59-½.
***
While in East Liverpool City Hospital for some mental health work that was performed on me, I got a good whiff of the air and yes, that draconian dragon, a hazardous waste incinerator, is really emitting some horrid gases and fumes into that little area where Ohio, West Virginia an Ohio meet. I could not leave the hospital and they offered to give me nicotine gum, which I had every three hours. It really staved-off the cravings for smokes and made me realize how lucky I am to be alive and just how fortunate I am to have been given a third chance with this cardio problem. I was also placed on a strict cardio diet, which I am still doing today. It’s got a lot of tasty foods available. I eat at home a lot and some of the low-fat, low-sodium, TV dinners are good for me to munch on and even one of these packages fills me up. I also like Little Debbie cakes, but can’t eat a half a box, just one for lunch and one for dinner.
Sometimes I really get the boo-hoo-hooeys and wish I would have died in the emergency room. Or the intensive care unit at North Side Hospital or Saint Elizabeth Trauma Center, two of the local hospitals that treated both of my heart attacks.
I don’t want to go back anytime soon.
Anyhow, do you know that hazardous waste incinerator never should have been built in the first place? I did another story on Daily Kos and even a longer piece of satire on The Spoof out of Lancaster, England, on that smoking monster, but they’ll never shut it down. Much prosperity was promised by Waste Technologies Industries when I was a general assignment reporter at The Evening Review in East Liverpool for nearly three years. When I returned a decade later to The Review, which the Ogden newspaper is now, publishers and editors welcomed me back with open arms. I was teaching during the day at Youngstown State University and working the afternoon shift as a general assignment reporter in East Liverpool. Nobody can keep such a grueling pace and schedule and I soon discovered the thrill of the slot machines. I got into a lot of trouble and had to go into a rehabilitation center in Branden, Miss., that has a world-renowned “treatment for gambling” facility. Ten years later I have been back home, in the Youngstown area, and that’s how long I have been freelancing, just about, give or take a year or two. Oh, and except for one little episode when I was really feeling sorry for myself, I have not gambled and although I did not drink, I enjoyed taking the pain killers (opiates) at the nursing home. I should have just taken generic Tylenol.
Anyhow, some amends can never be met. I have tried and tried to make my amends for that hazardous waste incinerator built in East Liverpool, but for the life of me, I have fallen short. I like to think that even when I was pretty fresh out of college and was a newbie to journalism, I was at least fair and accurate.
Martin Sheen was right. WTI should have never taken its first load of hazardous waste.
On an upbeat note, Happy Easter!