Story of his life.

My younger brother Mike is in the hospital in Las Vegas and doctors are clueless as to what’s wrong with him. He’s incoherent, agitated and doesn’t recognize our sister (who drove from Scottsdale to be with him) or even his own eight-year-old daughter. So far, all tests have come back negative.

He had a massive heart attack a few years ago (at age 50), has rampant diabetes, suffers from depression and has pretty much been living on borrowed time. My sister Patti and I always joked about him being indestructible, but we’re not joking now.

I take that back. Actually, we are. At first, Patti thought he might be faking the whole thing. Mike is a compulsive gambler and has had his share of ups and downs and lately there haven’t been too many ups. And him pulling the old “Vincent ‘The Chin’ Gigante-feigning-mental-illness-routine” is not entirely out of the realm of possibility.

The only theory that makes any sense to us right now is that maybe his diabetes has gotten so bad that it’s affecting the nerve endings in his brain and causing dementia, and that’s coming from the esteemed experts on the WebMD message boards.

My expert guess is that he’s just had enough. He’s talked about suicide before and his method just may be letting his health go to shit like this. Patti told me that she heard he was at the track last week and was on the verge of winning $250,000 in one of his crazy five-race parlays. His horse, like almost all of his horses, lost by a nose.

That’s the story of his life and maybe soon his death.