A Place Called Pismo

Let me tell you about this temporary little home of mine.  Pismo Beach is located on the central California coast, about 240 miles south of San Francisco and 180 miles north of Los Angeles. While the official population is measly 7655, there are a large number of vacation rentals around and multiple RV parks outskirts of town, so I’m guessing that the temporary and transient people in the area bump the population up by at least a thousand! 

 

My clothes are neither beach-y enough nor bohemian enough to give off the impression that I belong here. The town looks like it had its heyday in the 1950s and it continues to channel that vibe with its beach bungalow motels and neon signs.  Almost all of the chain stores have been kept at a distance. You won’t find a full-sized grocery store, a bank, or movie theater.  You WILL find motels, eateries, stores selling kitschy beachwear, 2 tattoo parlors, and a palm reader, among other things.

 

The Pacific Coast Highway (also known as Highway 1) runs along 650 miles of the California coast and passes right through Pismo Beach- 2 blocks from my front door, in fact! I see long-distance road bikers with their fully packed panniers riding through on a daily basis.  There are also a number of vineyards in the area, although the much more well-known regions of Napa and Sonoma lay a few hours further north.  I have yet to visit any of the wineries here but am hoping to make them the subject of a future post.

‘Pismo’ is a Chumash Indian word roughly translating to ‘tar’ and it refers to the natural asphalt that bubbles up through fissures in the ocean bottom and washes ashore along the beaches of central California.  This material combines with the extremely fine sands here to create beaches that are hard enough to drive on.  (At least 3 different people have assured me that even my 2-wheel drive can have its beach time as long as I stick to the hard-packed parts… still not sure I’m willing to chance it.)

The Pismo clam was once prolific along the beach.  Thanks to some serious overharvested by beach-goers past, and there are now some strict regulations in place and few clams to be found.  Nevertheless, there is a Pismo clam festival coming up in a couple of weeks.

There is a fairly visible-and fairly young- homeless population here.  I’ve been awoken by people going through the dumpster across the street, I’ve had my flip-flops stolen during a beach walk, and I’ve stumbled across numerous homeless camps in the woods while out on a run.  I suppose, if you have to be homeless, might as well pick a place with a mild climate and sea views….

There is also an increasingly visible shark population here.  People love flying their ‘drones’ out over the ocean to look for them!  Notices are regularly posted about shark sightings in the area.  It doesn’t stop the surfers but it certainly makes the casual beach-goers among us a little more weary!

 

 

Part of what makes this area so beautiful is the fact that you have sandy beaches combined with rocky cliffs and, beyond the cliffs, you have mountains in the distance.  It makes for some awfully pretty sunsets!

 

 

                                                    

Patients say the darndest things....

Before I start the work week tomorrow (they've got me on a Tuesday-Saturday schedule now), I wanted to share a few quick highlights from my patient interactions last week:

A 90-something year-old WWII vet parked his wheelchair next to me and said, "Okay, let's do some pumpin'!" (as in 'pumping iron').  He then dutifully proceeded to count out reps with his 2lb hand weights.

My therapy session with a 90 -something year-old lady involved working on her morning dressing and bathing routine.  Things were going smoothly until she realized that her family had forgotten to pack a critical piece of her wardrobe- her shoulder pads.  "I just feel lost without my shoulder pads!  I don't feel properly dressed!"  I had to take every cardigan out of her closet so that she could feel the shoulders and convince herself that they really weren't there.

While working on simple range-of-motion and strengthening exercises with a pleasantly confused lady with dementia,  I explained that we were going to do some punches- and suggested she imagine that someone she didn't like was standing in front of her.  That's not a suggestion that I usually make but, given her dementia, I wanted to make the instructions a little more concrete.  The patient replied, "I don't think that's a good exercise."  I backpedaled and said, "Its okay, you won't really be hitting anyone."  She shook her head at me and said, "Yes- but its still negative."  So I scrapped that visual and we ended up picking imaginary apples from imaginary trees instead!

The last little vignette I want to share is not a humorous one, but rather a proud therapist moment for me.  A patient with a recently replaced shoulder stated, "I like working with you because you make me do everything for myself."  You see, when helping him to the bathroom, the nursing assistants would always pull down the sheets for him, lock and unlock his wheelchair brakes, open the door and flip on the light, prepare the toilet paper, and flush the toilet for him afterwards.  None of these helpful gestures actually help prepare this patient for a successfully return home.

Occupational therapy is most definitely a 'helping' profession, but the challenge and the skill lay not in helping a patient out-right, but in grading an activity and providing the 'just right' challenge in order to foster independence and enable that patient to help himself.

Have a great week!

This is the front entrance to Marian Medical Center- faux belltowers and all. While I spend most of my time at Marian Extended Care (I am standing in front of the Extended Care to take this picture), I help out over at this hospital on Fridays and Saturdays.

Weekend Wildlife Adventures

I sprang into exploration mode during my first two weekends here.  

There are two other travel OTs working at the same facility as me and I have them to thank for my early adventuring.   Jenny and Mary invited me to join them for a weekend trip to Santa Cruz to stay with some travel PTs that Mary had met on a previous assignment.  Instead of unpacking my apartment, I threw together an overnight back and road-tripped a couple of hours up the coast.  Overall, Santa Cruz is a little on the grimy side.  It has a pier and a boardwalk that are reminiscent of Atlantic City with its shops and amusement park and foot-long hot dogs.  For me, the two most memorable parts of the weekend were seeing all of the bonfires on the beach at night and watching a colony of sea lions sunbathe on a platform under the pier.

I joined a couple of local MeetUp groups in an effort to get out and, well, meet people.  So the next weekend I set out for the Bishops Peak trailhead in order to meet up with a group of rock climbers who were happy to share their gear.  (Sadly, the bag containing my harness and climbing shoes was in the ‘if room’ pile when I was packing my car to drive out here and it didn’t make the final cut.)  It has been a number of years since I did any climbing outdoors so this made for a really fun morning.  I hiked to the summit of Bishops Peak for a super view out over San Luis Obispo before heading back home. 

The next day, Jenny and I hopped in the car for a shorter trip up the coast to San Simeon.  It is a very small town but it boasts two things that we wanted to see.  The first was Hearst Castle, an enormous home built by the newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst and spectacularly positioned with a commanding view over the surrounding countryside and coastline. The property itself is a working cattle ranch. There used to be hundreds of exotic species roaming the property and, while most of them are gone now, we did manage to see a herd of zebra off in the distance. The mansion is lavishly decorated with antiques collected in his travels- including multiple hand-carved wooden ceilings shipped over from Europe in their entirety. The Roman Pool was my favorite part of the tour by far- take a look at this photo!

In order to check item #2 off our San Simeon bucket list, we headed over to the pier.  In order to verify a little piece of insider information we had been given, I talked to the park ranger on duty there. He confirmed that the nice man Jenny and I had met at the Avila Farmer’s Market a couple of nights earlier had been correct- there was indeed a baby humpback whale hanging out in the harbor.  Apparently the whale had been there for about 4 weeks already and no one knew how much longer it would be there before the mother deemed it big enough to head out into the open ocean.  I was WAY more excited about seeing a baby whale than about seeing Hearst Castle.  So I asked the ranger to point me at the whale- and he handed me his binoculars.  The baby didn’t put on any impressive displays of breaching or tail-slapping, and it didn’t swim over to the pier to say hello.  It would just lazily surface every few minutes far off in the distance, sending a little flurry of seagulls up into the air each time.  So technically I’ve seen a baby whale!  Although it was not as up-close-and-personal an encounter as I would have liked, it still made for a great day.