A Little Help from My Friends
by Venetia Bradfield aka Viperfish
1. The Ordinary World
My Ordinary World was a used, 2002 Toyota Tacoma that I bought on Craigslist. It was my first major purchase since my husband decided to leave the family. I named him “Phoenix,” because I was rising from the ashes. In fact, there was an acrid, smoky smell to the interior, but holy catfish, did I ever love that truck!
Phoenix and I spent our early mornings together. I’d open the tailgate and my big dog Rocko would leap up into the bed of the truck, ears prickling for the roar of the engine and nose sniffing for the smell of seaweed. After our run on the beach, I’d fill the bed with the decrepit remains of my former life – broken dining room chairs, the family bed, the wedding photo, and other things my husband left behind. Phoenix enjoyed the dump as much as I did, his load lightening as I flung out the garbage, each piece hitting the concrete with a satisfying crunch. Phoenix was all about hope, resilience, freedom, and independence.
While Phoenix and I washed ourselves of my former life, I came up with a plan. A nursing career would not only feed my hunger to help others, but it would provide me with more money than my paltry earnings as a graphic artist. But I was in denial about how long it would take me to realize that goal. It took years to complete my pre-reqs, then I languished impatiently on a waiting list several more years before I finally started into a nursing program.
Phoenix had acquired a few dents in his bumper by the time we filled the bed of the truck and moved up to San Francisco, where I worked on my masters’ degree. I rented out my primary bedroom in Santa Cruz, as I needed the income to cover my tuition and the room I rented in San Francisco. I moved my bed down to the living room in Santa Cruz, and lived part-time in both cities. Not only was my son at home, but one of my daughters had returned from New York where she had gone to college. It was a golden time. For the most part.
While working on my nursing degree, Phoenix drove from hospital to hospital, where I completed my clinical rotations. He asked for a bath each time I worked at
Stanford Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto. He didn’t want to be outshined by the Lexuses in the parking lot. And yet, he wasn’t afraid to get dirty when I worked at Saint Francis Memorial in the Tenderloin district of SF, where I scrubbed eschar from burn victims’ bodies.
While whizzing through the nursing program, I tried to be everything to everyone. I adored having my kids at home and tried to be in Santa Cruz with them most weekends. The woman I was renting to turned out to be a real gem – my kids liked Sarah as much as I did, and she added stability to the household. She even bonded with Rocko, taking him on long walks at the beach or through the meadows in search of mountain lions, so I didn’t feel so guilty about leaving him for long periods of time.
Phoenix started to get a bit haggard as we traveled up and down the coast from San Francisco to Santa Cruz and back. My dad began to have difficulties managing his life, so I stepped in as best as I could, visiting him in Santa Barbara and managing his finances. Phoenix also took me to spend time with my sister Sue, who was struggling with her tracheostomy as her MSA (Multiple Systems Atrophy) Parkinson’s advanced. It seemed like everyone in our orbit was struggling. Even Rocko now required a ramp to crawl up into the bed of the truck. And all the while Phoenix kept on charging forward. But he was always thirsty, downing gasoline like it was lemonade.
Towards the end of my masters’ program Sarah was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She bravely chose not to have surgery and chemo and died within two months. Sue left us two weeks later, dying of MSA. It was unbearably sad. My mom died the following year from Alzheimer’s, and Rocko took off soon after that . It was too much to process!
Two weeks after Rocko died, Phoenix and I headed to Santa Maria, where I had gotten my first nursing job as an OB nurse. By that time. Phoenix had nearly three hundred thousand miles on him, but he just kept on chugging along.
We both did, as a matter of fact, but I began to feel a bit uncoordinated and inflexible. Why was that? At the time I passed it off as being the result of too many twelve-hour night shifts in a row. But I was fooling myself. My ordinary world was beginning to crash. I was on a downward spiral. Watch where you’re driving, Phoenix!