Larry's Story

Larry's Story details one man's fifteen-month-long spiritual journey, beginning with a debilitating stroke and culminating in his passing into Heaven, as witnessed by his wife, who describes seeing him being lifted up into Heaven by the hand of the Lord.

But Larry's Story is not so simplistic and pure. The author details her battle with the Advocate Hospital administration, part of the third-largest nonprofit health system in the US, which determined on the first day after Larry's admission that he had a poor rehab potential and decided he was to be given palliative care only with a transition to hospice. When Larry's wife refused to meekly acquiesce to the hospital's dictate of palliative care only for her husband and instead stated her determination to care for him at home, she quickly began to experience how heavy-handed and abusive a hospital administration can be.

After Larry's passing, the author obtained his thousands of pages of hospital charting and discovered that within the first weeks after Larry's stroke, when she refused to allow Larry to be put into a long-term nursing facility, the hospital began taking steps to have her removed as her husband's power of attorney. And they brought in a Medical Ethicist to their meetings to back them up.

It seems that as Larry's wife prayed to God for a miracle, the Lord did intervene, sending a guardian angel, Peg, to protect Larry from the cold-hearted and unrelenting pressure by the hospital to terminate him. Was Peg, who finally came to Larry's bedside and introduced herself to him, really his guardian angel? The reader can decide.