The Googleplex – Mountain View, California, April 2020
I had just made my way through and around the Googleplex, walking the road straddling the Shoreline Golf Course at a good clip, headed towards the Bay, looking ahead for the random mountain bike I might meet that morning. The ceiling was low, the April layer kept the temperature around 65ºF. You could taste the detritus of generations of Western gulls who learned to use the paths to break clamshells, mixed with the thick San Francisco Bay air.
The gulls, practiced in eating only the finest clams and brine shrimp out of the Bay, learned to gauge the right height to drop a clam, ensuring that the shell breaks and remains protected from the other gulls as they swoop in. Western gull society was not immune to gull-on-gull crime – clam theft – and their drop height calculus took theft into account, almost like a big box store.
I didn’t feel great that morning, but I am no slave to disease. Today I needed to walk because I walked every day, without fail. That was my rationale, that and to help clear out my lungs a bit.
My nose had been dripping for the last three days. I had gone through more than a few handkerchiefs, even falling asleep with one in my hand for the few grateful hours I could sleep.
I remember walking into the sun to the West, a sharp pain squeezing my abdomen and nothing else.
According to someone who knows someone who knows one of the poor Mountain View first responders who scraped me off the bike path, I was a mess – my pants, my clothes, everything was either wet with sweat or shit. I had emptied everything out, all at once. It was of little consequence, I was unconscious (probably before I concussed myself on the ground) and no longer a slave to vanity, not worried about the embarrassment of it all to my alleged social standing.
I skinned my left knee badly and somehow received a massive bruise on my left hip quadricep. My glasses were bent beyond use and my forehead embedded with white, chalky bits of clamshell, ground into my forehead.
They transported me from Shoreline Park to El Camino Hospital straight to the ER and then the ICU, where I slept in a medically-induced coma for nine days.
I don’t know how it all came back to me, but a few months after leaving the ICU, my wife made me document the events as best as I can. I might have missed or made up the odd detail, but under the fog of the Virus, any dream or nightmare seems within reach.
I got called home that day. Back to Clark Street. City of Orange. County of Orange. State of California.
Southern California. SoCal. The Magic Kingdom.
I almost forget waking up, but I remember everything.
Orange, California, February 9, 1971 – 6:01am
The earth was pissed, and she was letting her occupants in Southern California know, letting loose years of tension. It was sunny, clear, and cold in a light, dry way, but the weather mattered little, the sky above had no input on the shaking below. I was dreaming. Dreaming, as usual, about not getting my homework done the night before, though the work was likely done, safe, packed, and ready to turn in, a paranoid dream spurring me on, worrying me, making me think that somehow, I failed to . . .
Earthquakes trump all other “wrath of god” events – tornadoes, hurricanes, even a standard thunderstorm makes me worry, duck, and cover. An earthquake’s impact can be forever, but in the immediate now, your world flexes and distorts like so much lathe and plaster. You just wait, because there isn’t much else to do. You wait.
So, I waited.
In my upcoming future, I would live through many California earthquakes, including Loma Prieta eighteen years later, where I watched the first wave across the Santa Clara valley go through my living room, from left to right, lifting the hardwood floor up and then right back down, with nothing out of place, as if natural, as if it happened every day.
But it was 1971, and my head was being bounced off my bedroom wall.
I went into our old kitchen, next to the driveway, leading to the detached garage. The Knights of Columbus calendar distributed by the Holy Family Catholic Church Eucharistic Society seemed eager to confirm what I thought I realized about where I was.
It was still 1971. The 9th of February.
No tips for funerals
In 1971, the world’s population grew by 2.1%, the largest population growth ever recorded. The year saw the creation of many things still around today – Amtrak, Southwest Airlines, the first e-book and email, Greenpeace, Earth Day, and Médecins sans Frontiers. Somewhat drily and ironically, in an odd, measured, English way, Britain voted to enter the European Union in 1971, embarking on fifty years of pan-European enlightenment which witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union.
The Montreux Casino burned down during a Frank Zappa concert, inspiring Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water. DB Cooper jumped out of the back of a Boeing 727 into the night and legend.
Jim Morrison passed in Paris and took eternal residence in Père Lachaise, near the Communards’ Wall, le Mur des Fédérés, where the last of the Commune’s diehards were lined up against the wall, and shot.
Charles Manson was sentenced to death and that year, Attica blossomed. Alex and his droogs sat in a milk bar waiting to do the old in-out, in-out in A Clockwork Orange.
Taiwan was expelled from the United Nations, allowing for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to join the UN and given a seat on the Security Council. India and Pakistan fought.
Again.
In a move that would have a butterfly effect on my family’s life, South Vietnam invaded what was then the sovereign Kingdom of Laos.
Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs, a self-propelled traveling roadshow of misery, death, and federal jail time.
Very soon, sooner than I could have imagined as my head bounced off the oily green paint soaked into the drywall, the family would be in Laos precisely because of Nixon’s War on Drugs.
Years later, while going through Pop’s papers, I discovered a letter from Nixon, or most-likely Nixon’s office, thanking John for a letter to the President detailing out the prosecution of said drug war, one year before it started. Operation Intercept in 1969 at the Mexican border began it all.
Clark Street
In 1971, the family lived on Clark Street in the City of Orange, Orange County, in the shadow of Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) and St. Joseph’s Hospital, both run by the Sisters of St. Joseph, a group of Catholic penguins. My mother, Thérèse, worked at CHOC. Her being Québécoise helped, she was cut of the same grey cloth as the nuns and had been a novitiate before becoming an RN in 1953.
It was a dirty, smoky little street, carved out of orange groves overlooked by the St. Joseph’s hospital complex and bordered by Palmyra Avenue, Culver, a stretch of the Santa Fe railroad right of way, connecting Fullerton to Santa Ana and on to all points south to San Diego.
The street was no cul-de-sac, it was just a cul. On one side, the one-story, three-bedroom standard California ranch houses, as they were called, built-in western Tarrytowns, early southern California developments which started to pockmark the large ranchos and farms raising oranges after the Big One ended in 1945.
Eight (8) orange groves stood then; only one small heritage grove stands now. Times change.
The neighborhood then was best called mixed, and working class. It was a house for a nurse, easy to get to with no car nor need for parking – a short walk to work, through a path, and across Batavia Avenue at the corner of La Veta and you were there, at work.
We had lived in a duplex on Batavia before buying the house on Clark. I remember having a birthday party with the family sitting on suitcases. We had no chairs yet. It was the second place we lived in Orange, the first being the coach house on Olive Street eight of us lived in when we arrived in April 1964, joining my cousin’s family.
Across the street, three of the houses allowed their front lawns to be unfettered by fences and hedges, creating a fantastic place to play “over the line” in the summer, football, and British bulldog in the fall.
We roamed in packs, our biggest sins being the misdemeanor theft of gas caps from parked cars and baseball cards from the corner store down on Glassell.
My father, Pop (or John) (or Jean) was drawn to Southern California based on his travels, visiting Los Angeles (really San Pedro, the Port of Los Angeles) as a merchant mariner. Of note, my parents had driven a Volkswagen Beetle from Montréal to Mexico City, leaving me with relatives in Thetford Mines, a working asbestos mining town at the time, which explains much about the odd mental artifacts embedding my early youth and impacting me into therapy; asbestos and Volkswagens.
John had also visited the west coast on his way to and from Korea in the early ’50s, traveling through Vancouver in Canada and Oakland in the US, fighting for the United Nations.
My father, Jean (or John it seemed interchangeable his entire life) had just been hired by US Customs Service and was shuttling around the country, to a wide variety of US Customs ports and stations for his probationary training.
There were no border stations close to Orange County. My father was not going to get a plum assignment at LAX, and San Diego was too far of a commute. My father was 47 years old. He was never home and spent his free time working overtime, earning money.
In 1971, I was an altar boy in the 7th grade at Holy Family Catholic Church, which is now a full-blown Cathedral. Later, much later, a certain Father Ford, who was always pretty much an asshole, turned out to be more than an asshole. I lucked out and was only terrorized by the officious piece of shit, but others much more according to the records of the Diocese.
As the head sixth-grade altar boy, I helped bury everyone in the parish that year. Seventh graders serve weddings; sixth-graders funerals. People tip altar boys at weddings.
No tips for funerals.
Thalidomide®
How often do you second guess yourself and the decisions you make to either take action? Or not? At which point do you start questioning your choice for the family, your failure or success? Your children? Do they matter? Not yet – but soon. What’s freedom? Canadian freedom? US freedom? What do you decide to keep when you are uprooting life for a family of four? What do you keep? Blankets? Letters? What criteria, if any, do you employ? How do you get everything with you, unmolested, across a border?
On 27 March 1964, the Bédard family, left our home on Place Arthur Buies in Montréal-Est for California. Over the seven days (and seven nights), the family drove their blue 1963 Rambler American across the US on Route 66, towing what patrimoine and ephemera they angsted to decide whether or not the item was worthy of coming with the family to California.
John chose to be “not a citizen” for the next five years. He chose to make the family immigrants forever. On 4 April 1964, the Bédards arrived in Orange, California.
Mom had a prescription for Thalidomide for her second pregnancy, my brother, born in 1962.
Given Thérèse’s penchant for trying new drugs from work, the family was lucky that the Thalidomide sat on a shelf in the bathroom, untouched.
The drug, prescribed for morning sickness, caused horrific birth defects. It was marketed and sold in Canada and Europe, but in the US – a Canadian citizen who happened to be a US FDA employee, Frances Kelly, prevented its sale.
Frances was feted and later awarded a presidential medal for doing her job quite well, in a reserved and Canadian manner. All for morning sickness, which luckily Thérèse avoided without a Thalidomide assist.
The Nurse
It was this type of luck that kept Thérèse Bédard, RN, at the top of her game and in good form. The night before the Nurse was due to leave on her two-week vacation, all preparations were being put into place. Thérèse had finished updating all the patient information in the Kardex system, the way patients were tracked at the nurse’s station. Nurses lived and died by the Kardex, a folded card-stock roadmap to all things for the patient, completed in pencil and continuously updated.
She habitually carried a green pen – it was her shift color for the last rotation and allowed everyone to keep tabs on the patients.
Nursing in the seventies was a math-intensive profession. Very little came premeasured. You had to be able to figure proportions and solutions in your head quickly. There was no time for slide rules; no pocket calculator yet invented.
Nurses used the second hand of their wristwatch to figure out IV drip rates. They had to make their own compounds, including the mixing of custom antibiotics; Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is what you called a condom; the concept was just beginning to be dreamt about.
Nursing is about care, but it’s also very much about process and accountability. All communication revolved around the nursing station.
Hemophilia, childhood leukemia, all killers – death sentences coupled with experimental cocktails and imprecise science. As cruel as life may be today, it was crueler then. This was accentuated by the lens of a children’s hospital. So many died of leukemia.
Tortures were promoted as sciences and therapies, and everyone, from the care staff and the parents and siblings, suffered a pang of chemical guilt, driven by faint hope and incremental progressions in the size of tumors.
As DOW Chemical heralded better living through chemistry, they never highlighted their trade-in Agent Orange and napalm.
They knew how things transmitted, but the 20th century was in the first phase of its enlightenment about the treatment of viral diseases. Science had yet to figure out how to efficiently deliver the antiviral brews and drug therapies through the body’s gastrointestinal system.
Jane had been admitted last night, and everything seemed to go from bad to worse for the ten-year-old. Emaciated, she was spiking a temperature well about 103 degrees F.
Nurse Nelson was having trouble starting Jane’s IV, and Doctor Dvorak was getting pissed. The girl needed fluids in her stat and Nelson wasn’t getting it done.
“Where’s Bédard? She left the building yet? Where the hell is she?”
It was the end of Thérèse’s shift and she was putting together her kit and lunch bag at the nursing station.
“Thérèse! Dvorak needs you in two-oh-six.” Thérèse put down her purse, shuffled, and then ran to Room 206.
Leaving work would have to wait until she could get this IV started. She walked in to blood everywhere. On the floor. On the sheets. Coagulating here; in a wet pool there. A mess.
She quickly grabbed some cotton, the IV tray, and some alcohol. The blood in the crook of Jane’s elbow was dealt with quickly by the swab.
Thérèse grabbed some gauze and wiped Jane clean while looking for a vein, any vein, she could stick the needle into so fluids could start getting pumped in. She was crashing. No time. Get it started. Focus on the vein. Start it. Like that. Tape. Flowing? All done. Need to go.
“Thank you, Thérèse,” said Dr. Dvorak. “Have a great time on vacation, wherever you are going.”
“San Diego!”
“Nice place, take care.”
Thérèse went to the sink and cleaned up with Phisohex. She scrubbed a bit harder than usual because of the blood. Maybe she didn’t brush quite hard enough because she was in a hurry.
She made her way to the nurse’s station to get her things and hurry out the door into the Orange County night before anything more was asked of her.
All it took was a drop.
One drop.
Jane died the next day. No one told the Nurse the cause. No one new she had started the IV. Her shift had been over. The Kardex never lied, of course.
It’s as if Therese was never there, which she wasn’t.
Was she?
Meanwhile, Pop was rotated to San Ysidro, the same place we had visited secondary inspection, and he hoped to stick there. I think he was certain he was going to be there based on his local knowledge of Southern California and his ability to speak Spanish like a near-native, or at least with a Québécois accent instead of your standard Border Patrol bloody Yanqui accent.
He was right, and this would be a great time to get us to fall in love with San Diego, which is never hard to do.
This time, the two could vacation together in the same place. Joining US Customs meant long stretches in the field where the government wanted you to be, and John was no stranger to action, eager to make himself be seen and heard. He wanted a stable job to provide a stable home where my Mom didn’t need to work. She had shouldered the economic burden for years, ensuring that the family stuck it out in California. Without her, the Bédards might have been one more story in a tragic diaspora.
It was her turn.
Smelt
John was working the Mexican border at the Port of San Ysidro (not really a port, just an entrance) and living in a dive apartment in Chula Vista with a roommate, someone we might have met, likely a much younger trainee.
The stress of being a newly minted federal employee at 47 must have weighed on him. It’s easy to get old quick in a young, active, and dangerous world.
To survive, he put in place a routine learned working the Montréal docks and the American border for nine years with Canadian Immigration. He was no stranger to, nor fearful of fieldwork.
My uncles, Denis and Michel, each went with him on separate occasions as he made his rounds searching the alleys and bars in the Port of Montréal. Both independently described how he armed himself, strapping random blackjacks, brass knuckles, knives, and other tools of mayhem onto different appendages and parts of his anatomy.
Shift work defines the service society. Sleep deprivation morphs into an industrial disease alleviated by endless valium to sleep and Benzedrine and Actifed to function. From 8 to 4, to 4 to 12, to 12 to 8, a never-ending clock of work. When you work shift work, you live for the next shift.
Mom and Pop were two ships berthing in the house every eight hours or so, living the life they had grown into, like bamboo. There was little to no satisfaction in the lifestyle.
Something needed to change, and it was getting clear that we were moving to San Diego.
“We’re going to San Diego for a week or so,” said Mom, “It will be OK.”
It was the best-planned vacation, ever. Mainly because it really seemed like one of our only vacations, ever. Sure, we had taken the Santa Fe Super Chief from Olivera Street in Los Angeles to Chicago to Montréal to Québec City by train a full 72-hour nonstop ride in coach.
Flying Air Canada the next time we went up was a joy. I can still taste the little bar or sharp, white, Canadian cheddar wrapped in Air Canada plastic. But especially on these trips, we were mainly with Mom, I rarely remember us actually going somewhere together.
There are pictures from this vacation, three of us on a pier, three of us in the ocean. Me – fat, dumb, and young. Altar boy fodder.
In spite of living in Southern California, our leisure time often consisted of housing and shepherding visitors to Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, the beach, the bounty offered by Orange County at the time.
But Ocean Beach, OB, and its pier were different. San Diego was different. More laid back, less heat, ocean spray, and salt always in the air. Real Mexican food. Real beans. Real carnitas.
When it came time to go, we packed into the Rambler Classic (Mom’s white car as opposed to Pop’s blue Rambler American) and headed south to San Diego. We did not wear seatbelts. Pop drove and smoked the whole way down. Mom coughed, as we all did.
She was tired, having worked a little later than she thought she might have to . . . something about a tough case they needed her to start an IV on. Someone they had just brought in. Very sick girl.
The road meandered here and there as, Interstate 5 was yet to be hooked up completely connected, and built to make it all the way down to the Mexican border, as it does today. At different points in the road, the highway would go through some traffic lights and intersections, which was a good contretemps to a long hot drive. There was no air conditioning. A thick plastic cover protected the factory seats and stuck to us when we fell asleep, sucking sweat from our prepubescent, overheated bodies.
The car put my brother and I to sleep. We had both learned on the trip from Montréal down Route 66, our fiery own little touch of On the Road. Later, much later, I would realize that my idiocy was spawned from the same Kerouac factory hell of imposed Catholic ouvrier discipline. As it should be and as it always was and had been.
Oh, Québec, terre de mon enfance. Gone in 1964, and always remembered.
I have nowhere to remember where we stayed, though I’m sure all four of us were in one room, just like eight of us were crammed into a one-bedroom carriage house for our first three months in California on Olive Street.
I know that we visited many of the sites in San Diego – the Zoo, Sea World, Old Town, and down to Tijuana again, but what I remember best was the smelt – the grunion.
We purchased three droplines, each having up to five hooks. We needed bait, so we tested a variety of different baits (cheese, worms, marshmallows, etc.) before settling on beef liver (not calf liver; which we ate).
The pier was essentially a manmade reef, full of life, and the smelt swarmed around the pylons. You could see schools below moving as one from left to right and back, bobbing in the rhythmic swell which would break into a wave twenty yards further to shore.
We lowered our lines and the smelt began to strike, one after the other until all the hooks were either stripped of bait or holding a Pacific smelt. An embarrassment, maybe. Riches? Not really, baitfish like smelt is cheap.
What we kept did not go to waste, they were cleaned, fried, and eaten – the ones less than five inches didn’t need to be de-spined.
In what seemed to be a simpler world, fishing off a pier in San Diego in the sunshine and salt spray was a fantastic break from my Holy Family Catholic school studies.
Liver
When we got back from San Diego and Mom started feeling a little off, we thought it might be the smelt – they were a bit greasy. Bad smelt? Who knows what toxins might have come out of the ocean?
Bill Singer pitched for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He came down with a nasty case of Hepatitis B during the 1970 season. He came back and had a great year, throwing a no-hitter and winning a Comeback Player of the Year award.
Through the magic of my short-wave radio, Vin Scully, and the Dodger Farmer John network, I lived through Singer’s illness, recovery, and redemption, learning more than most eleven years old’s know about Hepatitis B, especially the significance of the color yellow – jaundice.
And that’s how I knew, the yellow.
My Mom stood in our living room in a bathrobe. She should be back at work by now. She never, ever hung out in her bathrobe always being on the way from here to somewhere else to be.
Her skin – yellow. The whites of her eyes – yellow. Le desespoir – despair creeping into her speech like a panic.
And just like that, it came to me in a wave of Dodger Blue – my Mom had turned yellow – just like Bill Singer – she had Hepatitis B.
I had no idea what that really meant.
Like COVID-19, Hepatitis B is a viral infection. Unlike COVID-19, it’s been around a lot longer and attacks the liver, and can cause both acute and chronic problems.
In the 1980s, a safe and effective vaccine was developed, making Hepatitis B more of a “third world” disease, like malaria. But in 1971, there was no vaccine.
If you were unlucky enough to catch Hepatitis B, you rode it out in a dark room, the only true therapy was time – there was no magic cure then, as there is no cure today. Over 375 million people are infected with the Hepatitis B virus. The virus kills, attacking the liver. If you survive a bout, it stays with you forever.
No one talked to us about anything. We were just two kids after all. What was happening to Mom was just what was happening. We were all sent to the 1971 equivalent of the Emergency Room for shots of gamma globulin to help us fight whatever virus might have been coursing through our systems. Everyone who came in contact with Therese Bedard lined up for the shot which was big, painful, and shot into one (or both) of the meaty part of your backside.
We were left in an empty house, Pop living in Chula Vista and sucking carbon monoxide and diesel fumes working primary inspection at San Ysidro. Our neighbor looked in on us from time to time, making sure the house still stood relatively intact with my 13-year-old self in charge.
I was left staring at two worn pairs of Mom’s white oxford lace-up shoes staring back at me. Will she see these again?
I was more worried about the footwear than my Mom. Things work that way sometimes. Any shoe in the closet might signal hope of getting through this, of survival. Inanimate, seemingly useless objects take on a deep meaning not easily explained by anything but the empty grief of not knowing if your Mom is coming back.
Los Altos, California – present day
I bounced back quicker than most, seeing how they found me splayed out on the bike path at Shoreline just over a month ago. In my delirium, my feverish fantasies, I went back to 1971. Fifty years ago, viruses also threatened at every turn.
This is a story about what happens when a healthcare worker’s body exceeds her physical limit, her capacity to survive. In the end, the Nurse lost her battle, as we all might someday, to a virus. But not that day.
As a Registered Nurse working at Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC), she was on the front lines of a war against disease which was kicking into high gear.
This is one she won. Barely.
In the summer of 1971, Thérèse almost left for good, another health worker casualty. We’ll never really know what happened. We can only guess.
We would have been denied, like so many families denied today by Covid-19. Denied of the right to shepherd someone into the hereafter. Denied giving presence to one of life’s great moments, death. Denial upon denial of things we consider basic parts of our lives – the transition to death. She suffered alone; as her children waited alone.
Fifty years ago, we went on vacation to San Diego, and the Beast came home with us. In 1971, my adolescent self watched Hepatitis B hit my family. It changed our lives. COVID-19 and Hepatitis B can both kill nurses dead.
The indecision and uncertainties of now replace the indecisive uncertainty of then.
One breath renews itself again and again, until the lungs die, followed by the heart, the brain, the body.
The body fails. The spirit lives on.
