This article was part of a package that was awarded 3rd place for Writer of the Year in the New York Press Association’s 2007 Better Newspaper Contest.
By Stephen Stirling
TimesLedger Newspapers
4/10/07
A faint smile spreads across the face of Daniel Flori as his wife attaches a small bag of liquid to a machine at his side. “Out with the old, in with the new right?” he says
A narrow, clear-plastic tube leading from the machine disappears into his arm. The machine beeps. Flori is set for another 24 hours.
Every day for the last year the 46-year-old Flushing native and his wife, Angela, have participated in this exercise and every day Flori’s life has depended on it. The 10-pound machine, constantly strapped to his side, delivers a 24-hour intravenous drip of Milrinone through a 2-foot long tube and directly into his heart to keep it from failing.
Flori, like 220 others in the New York metropolitan area, is awaiting a heart transplant. There are currently more than 94,000 people waiting for organ donors in the United States, according to the New York State Organ Donor Network — 2,834 of whom are in line for a heart. Flori has been active on the organ donor list for more than eight months and knows he could be waiting several months longer.
“It’s a terrible thing … you’re sitting there waiting for the phone to ring. You just want it to happen,” he said. “I got no energy no more. It’s just it’s hard now.”
Flori was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 1996. Intense radiation and chemotherapy treatments over the next two years sent his cancer into remission but destroyed his heart muscle.
In 1999, Flori started experiencing shortness of breath. Fearing that his cancer had returned and spread to his lungs, his doctors conducted a battery of tests and discovered that his heart was operating at a fraction of its normal capacity. A lung biopsy and a host of other tests determined that Flori was having adverse, though not uncommon, effects from his chemotherapy treatments, and his medication regiment was altered.
Five years later, Flori once again experienced shortness of breath as his heart began to weaken and his doctors asked him to take a pulmonary function test, a breathing exercise designed to measure lung capacity. Shortly after the test began, Flori collapsed — his heart had stopped.
“I had to help the nurses pick him up and put him on the floor. They tried CPR and they couldn’t revive him,” Angela Flori said. “We were praying.”
After minutes of CPR and several shocks delivered by a defibrillator, Flori’s heart began beating again. He woke up several days later in a hospital bed with bruises and burns on his chest, remnants of the frantic efforts of EMS officials who saved his life.
Flori said his condition has steadily worsened ever since, reaching a nadir in September when a pacemaker/defibrillator implanted in his chest to monitor his heart rate and provide electric shock if his heart weakened too severely activated three times in one day, nearly ending his life once again.
“Now I get up and I take a shower and that’s a big job for me,” he said. “For any normal person that would be nothing.”
Like several others in his situation, Flori lived an active life before he became ill. Born at Flushing Hospital on Independence Day in 1960, Flori created a successful life for himself in Queens, helping to run and expand his family’s fuel business, Season Fuel Oil Corporation, with his mother and father when he was fresh out of high school.
He and his wife, whom he married shortly thereafter, moved to New Hyde Park, L.I. They have three children — Andrea, Alexandra and Daniel.
Committed to the community, Flori coached all three of his children in local soccer leagues and has been an active member of the Flushing Rotary Club, a charitable organization of area business leaders who raise money and provide support for those in need.
Outwardly, Flori exudes optimism for the future, both personally and for the thousands of others currently waiting for an organ. The more he speaks, however, the dire nature of his condition becomes apparent, and discomfort radiates through his face, clearly worn by several years of health complications and a handful of near-death experiences.
“The waiting is terrible,” he said. “There are periods where you feel so poorly, you can’t breathe, and you just want it to stop.” “You know whatever will be will be. You’d just like it to come to some kind of conclusion.”
Despite his hardship, however, Flori has channeled his frustration into a positive experience, becoming an active volunteer for the New York Organ Donor Network.
“It’s really such a little problem with 100,000 people waiting, but people really need to talk about it,” Flori said. “I don’t think it’s so much that people don’t want to donate. I think they just don’t know what to do.”
Over the past year, Flori has been working with the New York Organ Donor Network, the Flushing Rotary and Rotary International to spread information about organ donation. Flori said he believes informing the public and promoting active discussion among family members are two simple keys to solving, or at the very least, increasing the number of organs available for donation.
Flori said it is essential to speak with your family above all else because they will ultimately have the final decision.
“What it comes down to, even if you become an organ donor, if you’re dying and your brother says don’t touch you, they wont touch you,” he said.
Flori currently takes 10 different medications daily, adheres to a extremely limited diet and restricts his activity but still is able to participate in his family’s life. Last month, he sat on the sidelines, coaching his 15-year-old daughter Alexandra’s soccer game as he had in so many years past.
Flori’s doctors at New York Presbyterian Hospital at Columbia University, however, say if he doesn’t receive a heart in the next year, he will likely die. A successful heart transplant would give him a 95 percent chance of a complete recovery, adding vital years to his life, something Flori said he’s willing to fight for.
“On the bad days I tell myself ‘you’re alive, Dan,’” he said. “If I can live, I want to live. I want to live for my children and for my wife. I want to live.”
Reach reporter Stephen Stirling by e-mail at news@timesledger.com or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 138.
Filed under: Features
