SURFIN’ SAFARI SUMMER THREE - DAY SIX July 5, 2021

It has been 14 hellacious days since Surfin’ Safari Summer Three, Day Five and Thursday finally brought a chance to slip-slide away for a few hours.

Anna’s sister Shirley is now parachuting in on a weekly basis to spend the day, which portends a possible two-safaris-over-three-days affair, if the Saturday caregiver can cover with some more consistency. And that would be great.

Anna is home now after much sturm and drang. She’d had a breakdown and was hospitalized. The medical team told us there were no infections in the body and that we could expect her erratic behavior to continue.

That wasn’t doable and I let this be known, so that machinations to place Anna in a facility were set in motion. Visions of a life unhindered by perpetual care needs and doctor visits and the endless surprises of living in a world where reason has no place, warred with a powerful nostalgia for the too few years we’d shared.

I visited on two different days and she was out cold, heavily sedated and restrained in some weird vest device. The hospital told me of its plans to discharge her to a nearby facility and that I should come up with somewhere between $2,600 for the first month at a place 40 minutes away, or $4,600 for something near our apartment.

Well, forget that and Anna looked like hell in there when I went to visit a third time. She was awake and a wave of recognition passed across her face so that, rather than having left us mentally, I could see she was very much there and desirous to be home and eating Italian cooking.

I entered Nurse Ratchet and exited Sir Galahad, and told the staff to round up a whole lotta sedative. Someone made a caustic remark about the desirability of sedation as a strategy. I suggested they would do much the same in a facility and not one of them made a peep in response.

At home, we tried a light dosage of the sedative and her Jungian shadow started surfacing so it was upped until she was no threat to even an ant. Our friend Cynthia came over to bathe Anna. Shirley arrived next and plied her with raw vegetables and essential oils, because that is what my sister-in-law does.

The next morning she had a seizure. I performed CPR. It was very dramatic, like an exorcism with vomit and bug-eyes. The ambulance took Anna to Kaiser Permanente where they wanted to do a discharge an hour later as there was “no medical reason to keep her.” I arrived at the emergency room, which smelled just awful, and that was because my wife was sitting naked in a pile of her own feces down the hall.

I could see why they wanted to discharge her. Anna's hands were in big oven mitts and there were bruises on her body. Clearly, she’d scuffled with the staff. I expressed a muted bemusement with their assessment that she would be better off at home and made clear she wasn't moving anywhere until they hit her, again, with some serious sedatives. This they did, knocking her out for about 17 hours.

So, Anna is home and I am trying to, I don’t know, rebuild her somewhat to the broken thing she was before she broke some more.

In recent days, she started the morning in good spirits and it seemed a shame to drug her up, but Wes and I are so spooked by her dark episodes that we are quick to pull the trigger.

On Saturday, we went as far as we could through the day without administering the sedative before she started coming off the rails at around 5 p.m.

So that’s how it’s going. Home and stoned. She qualifies for Medicare, but there are no beds, or she’s too young. Private providers are too expensive, so the hunt is on while, daily, I modulate between some sedative and lots.

Of course, there has always been a vague understanding that things would be this way -- that Anna would be committed -- but now that it is happening, what’s most disturbing is the realization that I have to make this decision.

Anna is not 88 like most dementia patients. She is what they call “ambulatory.” She has been going on Surfing Safaris for three years and taking urban hikes nightly over the same time period. She is strong and is not going to submissively stay at any "care room" nestled in a quiet neighborhood. She is going to have to be restrained and sedated, imprisoned.

It’s my call, and I couldn’t do it this time around. I don't like Nurse Ratchet.

Rushed out to the Marina upon Shirley’s arrival on Thursday. I didn’t want to be too far from home.

Meantime, an apex of sorts is where I am at with surfing as these most awful days of my life unfold. Confidence and even abandon are my bywords. There is a “no fear” aspect to the surfing ethos I never embraced, as a primary goal has always been not to die out on the water, and it has always hindered me.

But it’s been a tectonic few weeks. I brought a “Pacifico” tall boy out to the shore and quaffed it quickly before going in. High school bleachers style. There were bigger waves, the kind I usually pass on in caution and common sense, but caution and common sense can piss off these days. Drinking beer on my butt for the past 40 years couldn't have landed me in worse straights than have the pursuit of accomplishment and fulfillment...I am close to rogue at this point. I got in front of one, mounted, and slid straight downtownish. A little LIT and loose and that ride was so good I did it again. And then once more.

There was no fear. What is beyond the water, on shore; that is more threatening now.