Richard Caits presents his first book which besides a difficult situation, show us a lesson of hope and friendship. 

In my last trip to NYC I had the pleasure to meet Richard and listened to his life story, which was not easy. His mother experience 8-month hospitalization and death is something to think about, but also make us think and reflect. In this lines we will understand why is a story of hope and friendship, I bet more than one of us will identify with this book.

Camaleónicas: Tell us about your book. How this idea and project started? How, how you conceived the idea in general? 

Richard: It started because a bunch of people I knew last year, they said this has been a really unusual, hectic and crazy experience. Your mother’s been hospitalized for like eight months. Most people are not hospitalized for that long, you know, except for like terminally ill people. But she was not terminally ill to begin with. She entered the hospital because supposedly she had a psychotic outbreak at work, cops were called and she spent eight months in three different hospitals and she just kept getting sicker and sicker. And I came to the realization it’s the drugs that are doing it. She died in November last year. So around like April of this year, I finally started thinking about it. Friends of mine were telling me, you should really write a book about this. And I was resistant to that idea last year. But the more I thought about it, the more the idea germinated in my mind, I realized, yeah, I should write a book because the hospital system would prefer if she just died in a deep, dark hole and they moved on, kept quiet about it. 

“This is my way of keeping her memory alive.” Richard Caits

C: Because also art heals. So as a life lesson, how do you feel the book has helped you?

R: It’s a good question. It has helped me, I think, because I was really angry when I wrote this book at first, like the first rough draft, because I started writing in April and I finished in August and finally got it published in September. And through the act, the process of writing, I got less and less angry. I mean, I was basically angry the entire time I wrote the entire first rough draft. A lot of cursing, you know, a lot of foul language, but that’s the state of mind I was in. But then when I went back and reread it, 452 pages, went back and edited it, and edited it. And that made me realize, this actually has helped me. It’s helped me get a lot of this anger off my chest that these consequences in medicine or what’s happening also well you know everything is about economics nowadays that people when they read the book they are going to feel identified with the situation. Actually, I do think that because there’s a lot of people you know out there with a father, wife, husband, whatever, relative, friends in the hospital, and they feel maybe like they don’t know what to do. Maybe they feel helpless. They don’t know who to turn to, who to talk to.

“By writing this, I’m able to at least let people know, I’ve been in this situation too. I dealt with it. And I even offer some talking points, some advice.” Richard Caits

R: If you have a good friend, as I was fortunate enough to, and I mentioned him in the book, if you have a friend who’s a hospital advocate who actually has worked in the healthcare system, who’s able to not just talk to doctors, but also call doctors, quite frankly, lies when they have to, that helps a lot. Because my mother ultimately did not survive her eight-month hospitalization. But I am confident, I am sure that if I not had a very capable hospital advocate with me, she would have died a lot sooner maybe two three four months instead of having an eight month hospitalization I’m sure that I was able to at least if not save her life at least prolong it while she was in the hospital.

C: If you can concept in one word the main value that the book is going to give to people that reads the book what would the be? 

R: I wanna say HOPE. Because even though the story ultimately ended with her death, I don’t want it to come across as a sad story like “oh poor me, my mother died”, “the evil hospital system” (Laughs) because it’s really about that but at the same time it’s also about a story of friendship and hope. The friendships that supported me throughout her eight-month hospitalization the people who visited her in the hospital. I tried to make the story a little bit light-hearted that’s why I mixed it up in certain chapters like not every single chapter is about my mother in the hospital.

C: Now that the book is out, what has been your biggest challenge to publish this book?

R: I really didn’t have any challenges publishing it. I basically reached out to a publisher that I found through an internet search in LA. I read reviews of them online before I started to work with them. We basically worked together and they published, my book for me. If any, if there was anything challenging, I guess the most challenging part was just going back, re-editing, re-editing, re-editing, taking certain chapters out that I felt didn’t fit. That can be challenging too, deciding what fits, what drags it down, what makes it more depressing. Because that can be hard to judge sometimes.

 “When you’re writing, it’s hard to be subjective and objective.” Richard Caits

GET THE BOOK HERE