Hospice Nurse Goes Deerproof Plant Shopping

I have a new patient who happens to be staying in a house very close to where I live. When I drive out in the morning, I can actually see the window of the room where she lies, and I cannot help but think of her. This is one thing on a work day, when I am immersed in thinking about my patients anyway. But I have found it is quite a different thing on weekend days, when I am rolling out on my bike. Or in the early evening when I’m driving off to Fairfax Lumber to compulsively buy more deerproof plants for the deer to snack upon in my garden that night.

This has highlighted for me how I actually drive about the county of Marin in two very different frames of mind, and how the same world looks strangely like two entirely different worlds, depending on whether I’m at work or not. As a hospice nurse visiting patients where they live, I drive around the community all day from Monday to Friday. Evenings and weekends I drive around those same roads and neighborhoods but I feel that they are different.

Let me try to explain. When I am at work, as soon as I log in each morning at 8:30 and clip on my hospice badge, my world shrinks down to the worlds of my patients and their caregivers. I do see the rest of life as I drive around but it’s oddly irrelevant, almost as though I am viewing it through glass. I may stop at a local cafe to pick up a coffee, or drop quickly by the post-office, but if I’m in my work clothes, wearing my hospice nurse badge, and between patients, the world is sort of walled off from me and I feel that I cannot fully interact with it. My mind is busy with medication orders, concerns about a patient’s new symptoms, or the endless To Do list that comprises my day as a nurse. The time gets chewed up at a very constant and much faster pace than on a weekend day when I might meander from thing to thing with no rigid agenda.

Sometimes I take my daughter to the mall where, during the week, I often stop at a cafe between patient visits to chart. The mall looks distinctly different, depending on whether I’m at work or with Jessie shopping. It’s the same mall, clearly, but I’m engaging with it differently. At work, my focus is intense. The mall is really just a coffee delivery system, a place where I can sit in a booth and chart, make calls, and get med orders sent through. I barely notice the people around me, and two hours can go by like ten minutes as I try to get through the endless To Do list. Shopping there with Jessie on a Saturday, the pace of everything is slower. It’s like the mall, the people in it, the whole world has slowed down and opened out, because I’m not rushing to do thirty things in the next half hour, and because I can fully interact with everything that’s going on around me.

There has now been a blurring of the boundary between the world I’m actively engaged in (evenings, weekends) and that glassed-off-world feeling as I motor around the county as a hospice nurse. As I drove off to the gym after work this evening, I could not help glancing up at my patient’s window as I passed and wondering how she was, and how I will find her on my visit tomorrow. Did I order enough wound care supplies? How can we best support her friends as they care for her? And is she really on the best pain regimen going forward?

It’s fine for the boundary to be blurred, really. It’s not as though my boundaries are terribly strong to begin with. [Note to self: strengthen boundaries]. I check my work phone way too often nights and weekends when a patient is close to death. I sometimes take calls and answer emails after hours (strictly discouraged, you did not hear it from me). But the proximity of this patient to my home has made me realize the odd parallel existence of my two worlds and how I move between them almost without noticing. Now I’m noticing. And honestly, when I’m driving away from my house at 5:50pm on a Wednesday, I don’t want to be thinking about wound care supplies. I just want to be focussing on how Fairfax Lumber is closing soon and I only have 10 minutes to buy more deerproof plants for the deer to snack on.

Redwood Rain

Some days it’s a lot easier to plan getting out on the bike than it is actually doing it. There are nights I wheel my bike out from the basement and place it strategically against the kitchen table with all my gear around it. I put in my phone calendar Ride with an alarm wake-up of 6:30. And yet curiously, 6:30 comes and goes the next morning and I’m still in bed. And when I finally get up to press the button on my Mr. Coffee, there’s Matilda, still leaning happily against the kitchen table. Funny how that happens.

And then there are the rides I anticipate for days. I’m driving around Marin on Thursday and Friday between patients and I keep seeing bikers in their sleek kits and feeling envious as they ride by my car. How come I’m driving round seeing dying folks while you are powering along Lucas Valley Road towards Big Rock? Saturday night I put the bike out and at 6 on Sunday I’m up, making coffee, and getting my kit on. Sunglasses, bike gloves, sunblock, snacks, water...

Today was such a day. I put the call out Tuesday to all my riding buddies that I was planning to do the Pine Mountain/Stinson/Bolinas-Fairfax loop. It’s only about 40 miles but a lot of steep climbing. Cory was the only one who could make it, and she was going to peel off at Ridgecrest to Bolinas to see some friends. That left me doing more than half the ride alone. Ok, so. The mix of riding with a buddy and alone was perfect for me.

Cory met me near my home at 8 on Sunday and we set off up Pine Mountain. We had so much to catch up on that the ride up the two initial hills went by without us even noticing and all too soon we were at Ridgecrest where we hugged goodbye and she headed off down to Bolinas.

This was where the ride got really interesting for me. We had been riding in increasing fog up Tam, but at Ridgecrest it was the kind of fog that actively rains down on you. The road was wet and slick and as I set off along the Seven Sisters ridge, the fog was intense. It’s often described as a blanket, but this was more like a thick veil. It was blowing, and the road I knew had such stunning views down the mountain on both sides was completely socked in. After a few yards, I realized that I was in this surreal, white, blowing, enclosed world with visibility reduced to about thirty feet ahead. I started to laugh - what a metaphor for life! Only knowing what lay thirty feet ahead...it made such a farce of all the planning, the To Do lists, the stress of wondering how to pay for Jessie’s college...

I started to ride with a new, acutely heightened awareness of just the thirty feet around me. Occasionally, cars loomed out of the fog, other riders loomed, I couldn’t even make out their faces. There was nobody going my direction. On top of the mountain, I rode through the mini rain showers that redwood trees create. Redwoods gather the surrounding fog so it collects on their needles as moisture. When it’s too heavy, it falls off as rain. So you ride along dry road and then under a redwood it’s seriously raining. I stood under some of the trees and let them rain down on me. It was fragrant, fresh, and I thought about all the acid and toxic rain in the world and how clean this was. It was cold up there, but I didn’t care. On the long, fogbound stretches of road I stood up in the saddle, laughed out loud, even gave the odd whoop. I love my life! The redwoods didn’t care, they just shook off their rain showers and went on coolly converting carbon dioxide to oxygen, in spite of the moron on the bike.

The ride down to Stinson Beach was cold and exhilarating, a long downhill with many switchbacks. Close to town, the vegetation gets sort of tropical, big banana leaves, and the fog cleared enough to afford views of the lengthy stretch of Stinson. I was anticipating my hot coffee at the French guy’s stand outside the Stinson Beach Deli. He did not disappoint. My hands were almost too numb to pay him, but his coffee coursed through my entire body and thawed me out just nicely for the five miles south along Highway One, hugging the Bolinas Lagoon with a very narrow shoulder and many passing trucks before I turned with relief onto the mostly deserted Bourne Trail fire road.

It’s almost an hour climb with very little respite till you hit the Ridgecrest/Fairfax-Bolinas junction. It was extremely quiet, I only encountered three other riders, and I had to practice my habit of looking only at the twenty feet ahead of me in case I started to think of all that I still had to climb. I stopped a couple of times and looked down at the Bolinas Lagoon far below. Look how far I’ve climbed! Keep going. Like Dory in Finding Nemo, keep on swimming, just keep swimming...

Eventually, I hit the Ridgecrest junction. It was actively raining up there still, cold and blowing. The microclimates on Tam have to be experienced to be believed. I knew that by the time I hit the Alpine Lake dam, just a 10-minute ride downhill, it would be sunny and hot. 

The ride down to the dam is what’s known as a technical downhill. Basically, if you don’t brake, you’re screwed. And you have to know when to brake, and brake often. And you have to avoid braking too hard, so as not to fishtail on the slick road. And you have to hog the center of the road and force motorists to follow behind you, because trying to hug the right side to allow cars to pass is just too dangerous, too much debris, too many unknowns at such a speed. This tends to be unpopular with motorists who have never ridden the mountain on a road bike, despite the fact that bikers are generally doing 25-30mph, very little slower than any car could safely drive that road. I got yelled at today by a motorist. Try to ride on the right. Try it yourself, buddy, then yell at me.

The dam is my point of feeling like I’m getting close to home, like I’ve definitely broken the back of the ride. Despite the nearly five hours of riding behind me, I got my usual surge of energy on the road back up Pine Mountain. It’s a fairly easy uphill, and I know its every twist and turn intimately now. There’s a wonderful ease to riding a road you really know. There’s that little spritz of water from the horse trough that always makes me smile as it cools my legs before one of the bigger climbs. There’s the section of road with the one lane and the stop signs where I never have to stop because there are never any cars. There’s the last bit of hill before the gate comes into view that tells me I’m at Azalea Hill, the crest of Pine Mountain, and it’s all glorious downhill from here, with stunning views of the East Bay, till I hit Deer Park Villa at the bottom of the hill and the 2-minute coast to my house.

It’s hard to describe the euphoria of reaching my gate, clipping out, and wheeling my bike in after such a long ride. Everything in my body is saying I did it! I can barely stow my bike before getting in the shower, and the hot water just magnifies the endorphin high of the ride. Redwood rain is just wonderful, but I have to say a hot shower after a long ride beats it any day...

Let’s Meetup, Shall We?

Last night I joined an amateur astronomy meetup to go hear a lecture on Mt. Tam about the origins of the universe and why we are all moving so rapidly away from one another and was it something we said. The lecture was to be followed by a stargazing opportunity through lots of giant telescopes in the Rock Springs Parking lot. I thought stargazing sounded kind of romantic. 

I drove up there at sunset. It happens to be one of my favorite bike rides, up Mt. Tam from my front door, and I was feeling very good indeed as I drove. I had ridden the route in the early morning and was remembering the ride and listening to some favorite music as i took the curves maybe a little too fast and yes, I was sort of fantasizing that I might amazingly be about to meet the next love of my life at an astronomy meetup. He would be endearingly geeky, maybe a little overweight, hugely smart in a physics astronomy brilliant sort of way, and we might bond over the fact that E=MC squared, or that it’s turtles all the way down. Or maybe he would share his blanket with me, because I had forgotten to bring a blanket. Or water. Or snacks. Or really anything that thinking folks would bring to a late night astronomy meetup at the top of Mt. Tam. But I reckoned that I had enthusiasm going for me, and that was at least something.

The sun was setting very huge and red over the ocean as I drove along the Seven Sisters ridge, and there were tons of folks out on the mountainside on their blankets with their water and snacks, watching the sunset. Couples, mostly, I noticed. But some random groups of people and that encouraged me, because I was about to be a part of a random group of people (16, I had read on the Meetup site) all just gathering on the mountaintop to hear some lecture about the origins of the universe and then huddle intimately around telescopes in the Rock Springs Parking Lot and stargaze.

I thought stargaze had a sort of romantic ring to it. But no agenda really. I was just there to learn about the universe and the moving away from one another thing.

I finally made it to Rock Springs. Now I had signed up online for this meetup, and had even been so together as to print out the parking pass, which we were instructed to display on our dashboard so as to allow us to park at Rock Springs Parking Lot. Nevertheless, when I arrived there, it looked really full, and there was a very official looking small type of woman in one of those vests with the shiny stuff on it and she was waving at me in a negative sort of way. You can’t park here, she said loudly and officially, as I rolled up to her. This is for the SFAA event. You have to go to the upper parking lot.

Here is what I wanted to say to her: Who are you, exactly? And what is SFAA? I signed up for this event! I have a parking pass on my dashboard to allow me to park here! What is your job title, and with what spurious authorization are you disallowing me from parking here? 

Here is what I said to her: Oh, okay.

I drove up the road towards where she was gesturing. About a quarter mile up, there was a small parking lot. Cars were parked all around the perimeter, but there was a big open space in the middle. There were no markings, but someone had just parked there in a generally parking lot type of way, so I parked right beside them. I was just noticing folks heading down a trail that looked like it might lead to the lecture arena, and feeling pretty good about having snagged parking, when the small woman in the shiny jacket just sort of appeared in front of my car and started yelling you guys can’t park here! You can’t park here!

It may seem tediously repetitive at this point, but again, I let her bully me yet further up the mountain to where there was a muddy gravel parking lot with tons of spaces. Then I walked the quarter mile back down the mountain, by which time I was fifteen minutes late for the lecture. 

At this point, it was getting dark and I was really tired, having spent most of the afternoon at a bachelor party in Sonoma wineries, drinking many tiny tastes of multiple types of wine that all added up to only two glasses, but still, it had been very hot. Clearly another story. The point is, I joined the lecture well into it, so I completely missed the thesis (if there was one), plus there were many more than sixteen people there, and I realized that SFAA actually stood for San Francisco Amateur Astronomy, which I supposed belatedly was what my Meetup was part of. 

The sad truth of it? I was just one of about two hundred folk all sitting on the side of a mountain in the gathering dark hearing from some nerdy astronomer guy how gravity was really responsible for everything, everywhere. Three slides in, I was having to prop up my chin with both hands. I did hear him mention that billions of years in the future, we’ll all be so far apart that the night sky will be very boring indeed. However, I was comforted by his next assertion that by that time Earth will have been incinerated by the sun. So we don’t have to worry about the night sky being dark and gloomily devoid of stars after all. Hooray!

By the end of the lecture, I was only too glad to stumble off into the darkness and try to find my car. The thought of trying to stay awake through the romantic telescope stargazing portion of the evening was just too much.

So my current reading material happens to be a memoir by the former Marin County Coroner, Ken Holmes (remember: I am a hospice nurse). It’s a grisly sort of book entitled “The Education of a Coroner,” and in it, Ken devotes an entire chapter to the so-called Trailside Killer, who raped and killed a bunch of women on Mount Tam in the 1970s. As I was reading it, I remember thinking what woman would be so stupid as to go hiking alone on Mt. Tam? And yet here I was, wandering alone up a deserted road on the mountain IN THE DARK with only a vague idea of where my car was. Plenty of crackling in the bushes. Deer. Squirrels, probably. Are squirrels nocturnal? Does anyone know I’m up here, at a meetup, supposedly meeting the next love of my life? Will they even find my body?

I located my car, and headed gratefully back down towards the Rock Springs parking lot, intending to slope quietly by all the romantic stargazers huddled round their telescopes and drive at high speed back to Fairfax and my bed, which was really calling me at this point. Imagine my surprise and delight when my way was barred by the same little woman in the shiny jacket! She was once again, with tedious predictability, waving me away from my intended route. You can’t go that way, she called out officially. The road closed at sunset. You have to go down the mountain.

I’ll cut this short for you. Down the mountain the way I had come=40 minutes. Down the mountain the way she was making me go=90 minutes. Try to imagine the names I called her as I drove down Mt. Tam via the Pantoll, Stinson Beach, Olema, and all the way through the San Geronimo Valley to Fairfax. Really, it wasn’t her fault. And yet I called her all those names. Plus it was foggy and blowing, as it does on the coast in summer, and I was seriously exhausted. Still, I reasoned, that was a meetup, right? I mean, I could have met the next love of my life. Maybe next time.

Duplicate Post

Blogpost randomly reposted an old entry of mine from February 2017 this morning, titled “So I’m a Hospice Nurse and It’s All About Death.” Please ignore, this was an error.