Kaleidoscopes and Other Things

You know the movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”? Yea, the one with Jack Nicholson in the nut house.

Well, the movie was actually based on a novel written in 1962 by a man named Ken Kesey. Before writing his acclaimed novel, Ken spent some time at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Menlo Park, California as a paid volunteer taking LSD and recording its effects. Now, the government’s wacky misadventures into LSD experimentation is a wild, entertaining, and equally horrifying rabbit hole (just ask the CIA themselves: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/06760269), but I’m not here to talk about that (today). I want to talk about naturally occurring kaleidoscopes and how the very same Veterans Affairs hospital that came to inspire Mr. Ken Kesey also played an instrumental role in my own life and perspectives.

In the late Covid summer of 2020, I took a job at a VA nursing home in Menlo Park, California as a Recreation Therapist. The pay was good, and it was an invaluable first step in my career within the Department of Veterans Affairs. But truth be told, I didn’t know the hospital’s history at the time. Hell, I didn’t even fully register what it meant when the job description mentioned “Gero-Psych”. I just knew that they were somehow willing to pay me an awful lot of money to play games with Veterans. And at the peak of the pandemic, taking a job like that seemed worthy of moving across state lines.

Much like my detour through the Marine Corps, my adventure out west to California for my career was equally wrought with unexpected and eccentric serendipities. In retrospect, I now see both as insightful and rewarding chapters of my life, but at the time, as is typically the case, I often couldn’t help but fixate upon the unsteady manner of the trail being tread.

It takes experience to learn that it’s best to look up while walking. Our feet will find their footing on their own.

As I quickly came to learn upon my first day at work, Gero-Psych stood for Geriatric Psychology. That means, I was to be working with Veterans that were both old and challenged with complex mental health conditions such as Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, Dementia, Schizoaffective disorder, or the grand slam (all of the above).

You learn to keep your head on a swivel in places like that. That’s not to say I was in danger at all times, which is far from the truth, but I was quick to learn that it’s best to the assume such a possibility. Most days were relatively uneventful, but every once in a while you’d get a chair, or worse things, thrown in your direction. I was only swung at once, and that’s only because I got better at anticipating and preventing such things after the first fist was hurled in my direction.

The main thing that made the experience relatively safe, though, was that although the population was cognitively impaired, they were also old and slow. You might have one incredibly pissed off patient beating a war path directly toward you, but it was going to take him a few minutes to close the distance between you and him while he pushed the wheels of his wheelchair with wild eyed fervor.

My role, among a world-class interdisciplinary team of medical staff, was that of a Recreation Therapist, which means that my job was to advocate for and facilitate leisure and recreation engagement. On paper, the job sounds fairly cushy, but you try waltzing into the room of a hospice patient (whose schizophrenia has led him to believe that you are the devil incarnate) and try convincing him to paint a picture with you.

But most days were filled with fun, spontaneity, and a sense of improvisation that one learns to inhabit when working with those with dementia and/or other altered states of mind. Man, did I have fun on those wards. We played all sorts of games, went on adaptive bike rides, played a TON of monopoly, practiced Tai Chi, did some mild woodworking, practiced our golf putting, played plenty of boccia, and jammed out to all kinds of music.

With regard to the latter, I even got a little band together. On Friday mornings, I would gather a small group of patients in the rec room and we would let it loose! I’d play the guitar, patient X played the bongos, patient Z would smash the keys of a xylophone, patient Y would blow into his harmonicas, and patient W would scream at the top of his lungs whatever ravings were the flavor of the day. He would often scream this or that about Satan or his ex-wife, but it worked out okay, as I got myself a modest guitar amplifier and we figured ourselves to be a decent little metal band. “Wrist-band Metal”, I’d call it. I’m not so sure the nursing staff were big fans, though.

Five days a week, it was expected that I would be a reliable source of dopamine in an ocean of salty circumstances. In a way, it was a tremendous joy to be the source of such respite from slow and disorienting descents toward encroaching death. On the other hand, holding such responsibility came to embody a burden interwoven with responsibility and threatening guilt. If you don’t give it all one day, or God forbid take a day off, it wasn’t some company’s bottom line that would feel your absence.  

Furthermore, you don’t spend forty hours a week amongst the sick and dying to simply walk home without a thin film of emotional exhaustion coating your hair, skin, and clothes. Some days, it felt like I was wearing a big round nose at a funeral.

But the days carried on and the good days decisively outweighed the bad. I made friends with some of the veterans I served and a few in particular will forever stand out to me.

I recall one Veteran that was notorious amongst the nursing staff for constantly asking the same question over and over every thirty seconds, if not more. “What’s for dinner?” he forever pondered aloud. “Chicken,” was the agreed upon answer. But one day as he and I sat and marinated in a loooonnggggg game of chess, he looked up at a passing nursing aid and asked the perennial question. When the tried-and-true answer was given, he smiled and looked back at the chess board before turning to me with a confident smirk. “I like to keep them on their toes,” he said. I was stunned. I thought, well Fucking A, if he hasn’t just been messing with us the whole time.

For a day or so, I thought it might legitimately be the case, until the next afternoon when he emerged from his room completely covered in feces asking for a banana from a nearby intern stuck dead in her tracks. Before the man could even finish his inquiry, he looked upward into the neon lights of the ceiling as if in sudden recollection, leaned over, and pulled a half-eaten banana from beneath the cuff of his sweatpants. Standing, he then turned and addressed me in his own amazement. “Huh! Almost like a magic trick,” he said, bedazzled at himself. He took a bite, then turned to the intern standing nearby with her mouth now agape. “What’s for dinner?” he asked.

There were other patients that came to remind me of grander things, such as the triviality of my own conjured laments. One such patient, let’s call him John, was an individual that was somehow both as innocent of a soul as you can imagine, while also being a spontaneously violent and angry firebomb. His voice recalled visions of Forest Gump, and yet, I once saw the man rise from his wheelchair in a flash to stumble across the room to punch another patient in the face for being rude to a nurse. He was an enigma. Both Winnie the Pooh and vice itself.

But every week, John and I would take an adaptive bicycle out for a cruise around the Menlo Park VA campus. The rides were reliably idyllic as we would cruise under the gently swaying arms of the Coast Live Oaks and Redwood trees that lined the pathways. And despite the man’s many challenges, both physical and mental, I swear I have never seen a face as infatuated with the present moment as was his. “Oh my god,” he’d say slowly and breathily while slowly turning his head while I pedaled him through the streets. “Oh my god, everything is so beautiful” he’d repeat aloud, forever infatuated with the glory of those gentle rides under the California sun.

Covid got him one day and the next he was gone.

That was a hard one.

Around that time, I was riding my own bike to and from work every day. It was a picturesque thirty miles or so each way through towering Redwood groves and the equally imposing mansion-clad streets of Atherton.  One afternoon as I rode home, I recall looking up at the sun peeking through the dappled and flittering canopy of a eucalyptus branch swaying overhead.  

“Oh my God,” I thought.