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What’s the first stop you make after spending two months in the west wing of Oakland’s Kaiser Permanente ICU? If you are anything like my husband, Ralph, you go directly to Fentons Creamery and Restaurant, the venerable 110-year-old ice cream institution located just a few blocks up the street from the hospital, but a million miles away in terms of sweetness, atmo, and calorie counts. 

Because Fentons is completely wheelchair accessible, it was easy for Ralph to get through the wide front doors and navigate to a table with a view of Piedmont Avenue. Cold glasses of ice water were immediately delivered to us. A huge laminated menu with every conceivable frozen dessert concoction imaginable gave Ralph a moment of pause. For most of his time in ICU he had been nourished via a feeding tube placed strategically up his nose. It was only in the last few days of his seven-plus week stay that he had eaten any solid food. He hadn’t been happy with the hospital cuisine. We smuggled in hot pastrami sandwiches from nearby A.G. Ferarri’s Italian delicatessen, and chocolate devil’s food cake from their next door neighbor, Just Desserts. 

At Fentons, Ralph finally settled on a Black and Tan ice cream sundae, made with homemade vanilla ice cream and chocolate and caramel syrups, and topped with shaved almonds, whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. It came in a tall, beveled glass, a beautiful creation fit for a man who has just been sprung from Intensive Care. Ralph ate with gusto and when he was finished he sampled my monstrous banana split and then, still hungry, he ordered a root beer float. 

Normally, I would have advised against such an impulsive decision. Normally, he wouldn’t have wanted a second dessert. Normally, I wouldn’t order a banana split. But this was no ordinary occasion. Ralph had survived 51 days in ICU, 49 of them on a ventilator. He had endured irregular heartbeats, a tracheotomy, plummeting blood pressure, skyrocketing fevers, IV’s in his neck, arms and wrists. He had missed the Super Bowl, his sixty-fifth birthday, the Stanford-Cal basketball game, and Valentine’s Day. He deserved this small moment of pleasure. 

And I deserved it too. I hadn’t bothered telling him about the emergency root canal I had while he was in the hospital, or the 45 minutes I was stuck underwater on a hot, crowded BART train in the trans bay tube. I neglected to mention my trip to Santa Rita Jail to visit one of his attendants, the backed-up kitchen sink, or the leaky bathroom faucet . He had other, more important concerns, like staying awake and breathing. 

Neither of us has any illusions that this will be his last visit to Intensive Care. His health is fragile. The tracheotomy literally opens a new location for potential infections to invade his body. But at this moment we are happy. He is out of the hospital. He is home. He can eat a pastrami sandwich or two ice cream sundaes in a row and no one, least of all me, is going to offer objections. And as soon as our friend in Santa Rita gets paroled, we’re heading right back to Fentons.