When people ask me why I moved to California, I often demure.  Who wouldn’t want to live here, I’ll say, shrugging.  Have you seen the weather report?

Truth told, the original draw lay on the fourth floor of a mid-century building on the Palo Alto campus of Stanford Health Care.  A doctor belonging to the viral-encephalitis-as-culprit camp willingly accepted me as a patient in his controversial Chronic Fatigue Clinic.  Beginning in December of 2014, on the strength of my estranged husband’s obsessive search for someone to cure me, I flew out to California every three months to be poked, prodded, tested, and ferried from Infectious Disease to Neurology and back again.  

Ironically, when I moved to California and switched to California Blue Shield in January of 2019, I suddenly lost coverage for the Stanford services.  Eventually I landed at UCSF, with a string of vaguely anorexic millennials who seemed to have attended med school on daddy’s money and snapped their fingers in my face while denying that my existing diagnosis was “a thing”.  My stomach turned.  But then I came of age for Medicare, which disdains the whole concept of “networks”.  An earnest young clinician took pity on me and made a referral back to South Bay.

One only has to step into the halls of Stanford to understand the difference.  To be sure, competent medical folks roam other corridors, in other cities.  But at Stanford, the very linoleum exudes a certain kind of quiet confidence that seeps into your soul on entry.  You feel no arrogance, just brilliance.  Their eyes dance as they bend over your spastic legs with their piercing needles.  The jittering graph on the monitor mesmerizes them.  They gasp; they chortle; they grimace and huddle; and then they turn to you with nothing short of gratitude for allowing them to have such fun at your expense.  

I left Stanford a bit before 3:00 p.m. today, feeling oddly content.  I won’t get the surgeon’s pronouncement until next week, though by dinner time I already knew that I had flunked the bone density scan.  It matters not.  Give me cheerful news or dump dire predictions on my head.  One way or the other, I know I’m in good hands again.

I drove west and checked into a motel next to the Pacific.  I hear its song now:  Its steady hum; its rise and fall onto the beach; the occasional crescendo as the wind lifts a wave and lets it drop. 

I had dinner at the adjacent restaurant.  As I finished my wine and watched the sun send its ruby flames through a low bank of clouds, three women settled in the corner table.  One of them called across to me that she liked my scarf.  I stopped to thank her, and soon, in the way of women everywhere, we assumed an easy banter.

Somehow the conversation flowed around to places of origin.  One said, I’m from St. Louis, and of course, I had to ask her where she had attended high school.  Hazelwood, she acknowledged, prompting us to ferret out a connection between my cousins and a childhood pal of hers.  Another mentioned Washington, Missouri, inspiring me to name two friends there, Mike and Portia Clark.  Of course I know them, she exclaimed.  What sweet people!  Portia taught my daughter!  A moment later, I sank into the fourth chair at their table.  Our life stories tumbled out, while the sun slipped into the rippling omnipresent water, darkness gathered beyond the seawall, and my world turned another click closer to joy.

It’s the eighteenth day of the ninety-eighth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.