When the call came to change my appointment at the Stanford Spine Clinic to a video visit, my first reaction surprised the scheduling clerk. Awesome! I exclaimed. She laughed but did not question my exuberance.
I could have cancelled my weekend on the coast. After all, I now had no immediate need to travel west. The appointment could happen from the comfort of my tiny house after a half-day of work. But the sea beckoned so I headed to Half Moon Bay with a full tank of gas and a fully charged phone.
I first saw the Pacific Ocean in 1980 with a boyfriend long vanished from my life. We drove to San Francisco for Christmas, through Utah in my 1972 Chevy Nova that kept dying as we crossed the Salt Lake flats. We sat by the bay in a heavy fog and wondered why everyone seemed so happy. On my second trip for treatment at Stanford in early 2015, I drove over the La Honda road to the Great Coastal Highway and found the answer.
The video visit went off without a hitch. The neurologist and I bonded over a shared first name, though her “Corinne” has an “a” on the end. How do you pronounce yours, she trilled, and laughed in delight that we both hit that long “e”. Then she split the screen and delivered an intricate lecture on spinal stenosis and several other maladies. I stared at the image of my pinched nerve canal and remembered, with no small measure of dismay, my constant nagging of various doctors for help with my increasingly numb feet.
Now I’m in a small building on a working horse farm in Pescadero. Three glorious days near my beloved Pacific stretch before me. Tomorrow I will wander down to the town with my egg-salad sandwich and my bottle of Super Greens juice. I will pull over to photograph sea gulls. When the sun sets, my camera will seek the dance of its amber rays on the misty clouds. And I will sleep — oh, how I will sleep, with the heady air and the ocean’s voice and the soft certain knowledge of the coming dawn.
It’s the third day of the ninety-eighth month of My Year Without Complaining. Life continues.
