With New Heart Comes A Gift

Lane DeGregory: TAMPA — He keeps his keyboard in the nurses' closet on the trauma ward, beside the potty chairs and batteries.

Three days a week, he takes out the Casio and sets it on a cart. He pushes the cart slowly, cradling the keyboard with one arm, through the long hallways of Tampa General Hospital.

His name is William C. Ismer. Everyone calls him Bill or "The Piano Man." He is 65, a Navy veteran, a retired cop. Most of the nurses know his story.

On this Thursday morning, he rolls his portable piano into the cardiac intensive care unit, turns into the last room on the right.

The room he almost died in, 13 years ago.

"Good morning!" he calls to a pale man in the railed bed. "I told you I'd be back. How you doing?"