Walk #149: Walking with Hunter...

GG and Hunter, enjoying refreshments and Oysters...

GG puts fresh oysters in the shell on the barbie...

Oh no! Another barbecue with my psychiatric nurse friends! We were to meet after work, in the city of Napa, at a charter member of The Psychiatric Nurses Anonymous home. Five of us this time. These gatherings are impromptu meetings of jaded and worn out professionals. If you added up all the years of experience, it would be someplace in the 105 year range. And that is including one nurse who has but one year's worth of experience (always good to have a newbie around).

So we gather at R.O.'s house, meat in hand. We had three feet of pork loin, dozens of fresh oysters, crab sausages, burgers, chicken quarters and salmon. We fire up the barbie and begin to talk.

Psychiatric nursing is a dying profession. The heyday crested about 1990, just about the time we figured out that mental illness is TREATABLE and NOT HOPELESS. Since then, the funding has been mostly downhill. Units started closing. Budgets got slashed. Insurance companies reduced lengths of stays. And we have the situation now, which is rapidly descending into barbarism. Why give a rip about a filthy, dirty, scary homeless man?

During this recession, that looks more and more like a depression, the mentally ill have already started to die in higher numbers. Personally, I can attest to a death of a mentally ill gentleman during the last heat wave--two weeks ago (exposure). Crises Units are closing in Sacramento. Our own hospital teeters on the edge of bankruptcy due to a 50% reduction in reimbursement from Medicaid.

The least of these always get the least.

When Psychiatric Nurses meet, it is much like the cloistered secrecy of the Vatican (or the Kremlin). Sworn to privacy laws, the only people we really can share stories with are each other. Some of the stories would surprise, amaze or disgust you. So we talk, as we eat artisan cheese and drink wine.

We have fun preparing and cooking the food. Slow food prepared by slow nurses. Lots of garlic and bizarre herbal rubs are applied to the various species we are eating. We saute' a variety of mushrooms, onions and garlic as a sauce.

We eat. Delish...as Rachel Rae would say.

After dinner, my friend Hunter (as I call him because he looks and acts like Hunter Thompson) and I go for a walk. We are in a more modern part of Napa. Suburbs. No sidewalks. Our mission? To walk to a local market for a bottle of Jim Beam.

I am on my best behavior, due to working the next day. But a couple of the tribe would like to have an after dinner whiskey on the rocks. Hunter and I walk to the store and walk back to the gathering.

Another walk done.