Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) Read Online Free
Author: Susan Fanetti
eunuch, but he wasn’t one. Maybe life would have been easier if he were.
“Okay. Well, let’s start here: any therapy plan we work on together will include a psychologist. At least to start. Not because you’re ‘nuts’”—she made the quotation marks obvious—“but because you stopped therapy at a critical moment, and you didn’t go back to it despite marked losses. That, among other things, suggests depression to me, and depression is a significant obstacle to the goals you listed. Therapy can’t be productive unless we deal with all the challenges you face. Will you agree to that?”
He wanted to say no and get up and leave. He wasn’t nuts. But he was sitting in this office because his family kept telling him he was being an asshole, and because when, on Christmas night, his father had wept and begged until he had gasped for breath, he’d really felt like one.
He thought about all the nights he’d spent lying in bed with his fucking cannula in, or sometimes even the mask, wishing he’d just die and get the whole show over with.
He thought about how fucking miserable he was. How much he hated everything about himself. How he had nothing, when everyone around him had everything.
Yeah, he was depressed. Sure. He didn’t know how talking about it would make it better, since not being able to talk was most of the fucking problem, but it probably couldn’t make it worse. He’d promised Pop he’d try, and here he was, trying.
He nodded.
~oOo~
By the time Dr. Turillo left the room and Joey could finally put his shirt back on, he had an appointment with a headshrinker for the following week. He had an appointment that very afternoon at the Rehabilitation Therapy Center with a speech therapist and a physical therapist—not because his arms and legs didn’t work, but because any fitness plan had to take his stupid defective lungs into account. Oh—and he had the number of a nutritionist. And a follow-up with Turillo in six weeks.
She had kept calling all these specialists Joey’s ‘team.’ He had become an actual project.
As he stood at the bank of elevators, waiting for an upward car so he could go to the RTC for his appointments, a downward car opened, and an old couple got out. It sat there for a second or two, open and empty. Down. To the lobby. Out the door. Back to Quiet Cove. Where everybody could leave him the fuck alone, thank you very much.
As he pressed the down button and took a step toward that car, an upward car opened.
Feeling bitter, Joey got in and pressed the floor for the Rehabilitation Therapy Center.
~oOo~
Most of the patients at a therapy center—and the RTC was no different, as far as Joey could tell—were either very young or very old. In other words: weak. Joey fucking hated it. Sitting in the waiting room, with one area full of small chairs and bright plastic toys, with a television on the wall playing Disney movies, and the rest of the room full of coughing, snorting, groaning old codgers, Joey felt like a lost soul.
Occasionally, a youngish adult would come in with their knee in a brace, or something like that, probably an athletic injury of some sort, but that was even worse, as he sat there with his fucking oxygen tank in its snazzy red backpack.
But he sat there, and when he was called—as Joey, this time—he went back and met with Evan, who worked out a fitness plan for him and gave him a bunch of shit he was supposed to track. Then he met with Gayle—and thank God she wasn’t hot. The speech stuff was mostly familiar to him. Lots of ‘imaging’ strategies and repetition exercises. So very dull—and not all that easy. But some stuff was different from what he’d done before.
He was supposed to meet three times weekly with Evan and twice weekly with Gayle. He was going to be putting a lot of miles on his Jeep.
He hated it all so very fucking much. But he had been
“Okay. Well, let’s start here: any therapy plan we work on together will include a psychologist. At least to start. Not because you’re ‘nuts’”—she made the quotation marks obvious—“but because you stopped therapy at a critical moment, and you didn’t go back to it despite marked losses. That, among other things, suggests depression to me, and depression is a significant obstacle to the goals you listed. Therapy can’t be productive unless we deal with all the challenges you face. Will you agree to that?”
He wanted to say no and get up and leave. He wasn’t nuts. But he was sitting in this office because his family kept telling him he was being an asshole, and because when, on Christmas night, his father had wept and begged until he had gasped for breath, he’d really felt like one.
He thought about all the nights he’d spent lying in bed with his fucking cannula in, or sometimes even the mask, wishing he’d just die and get the whole show over with.
He thought about how fucking miserable he was. How much he hated everything about himself. How he had nothing, when everyone around him had everything.
Yeah, he was depressed. Sure. He didn’t know how talking about it would make it better, since not being able to talk was most of the fucking problem, but it probably couldn’t make it worse. He’d promised Pop he’d try, and here he was, trying.
He nodded.
~oOo~
By the time Dr. Turillo left the room and Joey could finally put his shirt back on, he had an appointment with a headshrinker for the following week. He had an appointment that very afternoon at the Rehabilitation Therapy Center with a speech therapist and a physical therapist—not because his arms and legs didn’t work, but because any fitness plan had to take his stupid defective lungs into account. Oh—and he had the number of a nutritionist. And a follow-up with Turillo in six weeks.
She had kept calling all these specialists Joey’s ‘team.’ He had become an actual project.
As he stood at the bank of elevators, waiting for an upward car so he could go to the RTC for his appointments, a downward car opened, and an old couple got out. It sat there for a second or two, open and empty. Down. To the lobby. Out the door. Back to Quiet Cove. Where everybody could leave him the fuck alone, thank you very much.
As he pressed the down button and took a step toward that car, an upward car opened.
Feeling bitter, Joey got in and pressed the floor for the Rehabilitation Therapy Center.
~oOo~
Most of the patients at a therapy center—and the RTC was no different, as far as Joey could tell—were either very young or very old. In other words: weak. Joey fucking hated it. Sitting in the waiting room, with one area full of small chairs and bright plastic toys, with a television on the wall playing Disney movies, and the rest of the room full of coughing, snorting, groaning old codgers, Joey felt like a lost soul.
Occasionally, a youngish adult would come in with their knee in a brace, or something like that, probably an athletic injury of some sort, but that was even worse, as he sat there with his fucking oxygen tank in its snazzy red backpack.
But he sat there, and when he was called—as Joey, this time—he went back and met with Evan, who worked out a fitness plan for him and gave him a bunch of shit he was supposed to track. Then he met with Gayle—and thank God she wasn’t hot. The speech stuff was mostly familiar to him. Lots of ‘imaging’ strategies and repetition exercises. So very dull—and not all that easy. But some stuff was different from what he’d done before.
He was supposed to meet three times weekly with Evan and twice weekly with Gayle. He was going to be putting a lot of miles on his Jeep.
He hated it all so very fucking much. But he had been
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