The spousette was not satisfied with the level of care provided by Oakland CaesarCare, toward which a not inconsiderable fraction of my modest pension is diverted each month for our medical coverage, and I am compelled to acknowledge that while the outfit did right by me six years ago when the cardiac plumbing had to be reamed out, in the present crisis they have been inefficient, uncommunicative and dilatory, so when L wanted to visit Cedars-Sinai in Southern California for a “second opinion,” I was cool with that, and I packed for five days away when we drove down here.

That Cedars-Sinai appears to have it far more “together” than CaesarCare I do not contest. I was unprepared, however, for wifey to commit unilaterally to a course of treatment that will require us to spend almost all our time in the San Fernando Valley, in which I was raised, and which I quit as soon as I had attained my full growth, until sometime the other side of the autumnal equinox. But here we are. As you, my auditors, might imagine, my practical objections to spending three months away from home on no notice were brushed aside by an interlocutor whose arsenal includes the C-bomb, which mine obviously does not.

I have secured her consent to a provisional parole back to Oakland for a few days at the turning of the month, assuming that she feels well enough to travel by then—her first chemo was yesterday—which will permit me to put in train at least some serviceable measures by which our extended absence may be addressed: we do not wish to return to find the premises looted or (Oakland being Oakland) occupied by squatters.

An old friend’s daughter has kindly made her vacant Northridge* condominium available to us, having transferred half a year ago her domicile to her new husband’s home (amusingly, about fifty steps across an alley from a house in which my family and I lived in 1958-59), and having “dragged [her] feet” during the interval getting it ready for the rental market. The appointments are on the spartan side, and the unit is on three levels, which is hard on the geriatric dog, but it’s only about five miles from the facility to which the patient will be reporting at 21-day intervals for the next few months. The couple offered it to us gratis, but they are struggling millennials who were, so I gather, kinda sorta counting on the rental income, so we, who were until just now near the peak of our earning years, are paying them a grand a month and covering the utilities.

Temperatures in the San Fernando Valley have been hovering just north of 100° F in the nine days since our arrival. It’s 63° in Oakland today. The landscape of this bleak slurb is dotted with strip malls, fast food joints, apartments and condos, shabby postwar tract homes. The latter were nothing to write home about even in the fifties, but in those days, before they metastasized, they were little clots of subdivisions planted among the ranches and citrus groves, and three-quarters of a century of deferred maintenance have taken their toll. The newer higher-end neighborhoods (some miles distant) consist of McMansions within “gated communities” with private security and private schools. The culinary opportunities within a significant radius of where I write are…sparse, not that the immunocompromised spouse and I anticipate dining out much.

That’s the latest news from the healthcare front. Pissing and moaning to follow now and then as details break.

crud-ially,

* Northridge is a mere postal designation of Los Angeles, although true “Angelenos” rightly tend to regard the entire Valley as a largely irrelevant appendage to the city proper. From 1908 until 1929 the community was known as “Zelzah,” which survives as the name of a short north-south avenue therein.