Security
It began at 4:00 am at the
TSA checkpoint, Logan Airport, Boston. My brother, Andy, and his wife, Karen,
zipped through without a problem. Kim did too. A TSA agent shouted, “MALE
ASSIST, MALE ASSIST.” I waited a long while for the male assist.
He noticed I had my backpack hanging off my
wheelchair. To remove it, I explained, he would need to take off the headrest. Male assist dude couldn’t figure out how.
“My wife just went
through security. Go get her, and she’ll help you.”
After a few minutes,
Karen, not Kim, arrived and explained that Kim was in the bathroom. Karen couldn’t figure
out how to remove the headrest either.
As I sat there, the current of busy travelers
flowed around me like I was a boulder in the middle of a stream. Eventually, I spied
Kim. She and Karen changed places. Kim removed the headrest, placed the
backpack on the conveyor belt, and reinstalled the headrest.
Onward.
The male assist dude guided me to a spot where he could pat me down and inspect my
wheelchair. I soon discovered he was a mere trainee. Two senior personnel
directed his every move and criticized his numerous nonconformities. Several times, they made him go back and repeat steps until
he got them right. By the end, he was quite flustered, and so was I. When
I finally arrived at the gate, it was time for me to board, so my plans for a
leisurely breakfast never materialized.
Transfers
Wheelchair people use
the word
transfer to describe the process
where we move from our wheelchair to something else or from something else to
our wheelchair or from something else to something else altogether.
Transfer
is an appropriate word for the controlled manner I move from my wheelchair to
my bed at home, for example.
Transfer, however, was not an apt description of how I moved from seat to seat
when we flew to Fort Lauderdale last week. Better words would have been:
dragged, stuffed, tossed, yanked, ejected,
eighty-sixed, or given the ‘ol heave ho, in no particular order.
“Mitch, how many of
these
transfers does it take to fly
from Boston to Fort Lauderdale?” I’m glad you asked. Let’s count…
- from my
personal wheelchair to the Boston airport’s aisle chair*
- from aisle
chair to airplane seat
- from airplane
seat to Dulles’ aisle chair
- from Dulles’
aisle chair to Dulles’ wheelchair
- from Dulles’
wheelchair to aisle chair for second
flight
- from aisle
chair to airplane seat, second flight
- from airplane
seat to aisle chair, Fort Lauderdale airport
- from aisle
chair to my personal wheelchair, Fort Lauderdale airport
That’s right; it took eight transfers using a slide
board and brute strength. I had assigned Andy, Karen, and Kim specific duties during these transfers, and
they dispatched said duties with aplomb. Airport personnel helped too, but they
hadn’t attended my mandatory training sessions (worth 10 Continuing Education
Credits) and received my certificate of completion, suitable for framing, as
the others had.
Four Hundred and Forty Pounds
Transfers and TSA pat
downs weren’t the only problems. While our 737 sat on the tarmac at Logan
Airport on Sunday morning, one of the baggage handlers came down the aisle to
ask me a question. “How do you either fold down or remove the back of your
power wheelchair? It’s too tall to fit in the luggage door.”
I responded, “I don’t
think there is a way. You’ll have to lift the chair and turn it sideways, like
moving a sofa through an apartment door.”
“How much does that
chair weigh?” He asked.
“Four hundred and
forty pounds.”
He rolled his eyes and
said, “We’ll figure something out.”
Looking out the
airplane window, we watched a group of baggage handlers wrestling with the
wheelchair, and this made us a little queasy. After a time, the captain announced,
“We’re still loading the final pieces of luggage. It shouldn’t be long.” I
appreciated how he didn’t point out that I was the one holding up the entire
flight.
After a 20-minute
delay, we took off. At Dulles Airport, we exited the airplane without incident,
zipped down the terminal and were the first to board our connecting flight.
Once again, we looked out the window and saw baggage handlers examining my
wheelchair, pushing on the seatback, and
scratching their heads.
“Wait a minute!” I said
to Kim. “If we re-attach the joystick controller we can recline the seatback.
That should solve the problem.”
Kim rummaged through
her carry-on and found the controller we had removed from the wheelchair, for safekeeping, after I transferred to the aisle
chair in Boston. She swam upstream against the passengers still boarding and approached the flight attendants with this simple, elegant
solution.
“I’m sorry, but you
can’t go down there,” said one attendant.
“But all I need to do
is…”
“No. You absolutely
cannot do that,” said the other attendant, looking down his nose at Kim as if
speaking to a small child who had asked if she might sit on the pilot’s lap and
steer the plane.
How foolish of us.
Then we saw the
baggage handlers open a toolbox and begin operating on my wheelchair. Although
I couldn’t read their lips, I imagined them saying:
Scalpel…
… Scalpel
Clamp…
… Clamp
Suction…
… Suction
I think I’ve got it. There it is, success…
… You are such a brilliant surgeon
And you are such a lovely nurse. Now wait for me in the doctors’ lounge, and I’ll show you some of my other
skills. (Perhaps I’ve been
watching too many hospital dramas over the years.)
Somehow, these baggage handlers lowered the seatback and
got the chair loaded into the airplane.
Champagne
When we arrived in
Fort Lauderdale, they brought the wheelchair
up to the mouth of the plane, and I transferred to it. Sure, the seatback was
too low, but we cared only about getting to the ship. Seating adjustments could
wait.
Less than an hour
afterward, the four of us joined my brother, Tom, and his wife, Diane, who had
wisely flown down a day earlier. We lounged on the deck of our stateroom on the Celebrity Silhouette, relieved
that the journey we had worried about for months was behind us. Although we
experienced some rough patches on the flights down, we made it in time and
intact. And, like a mother who endured unbelievable pain and discomfort
throughout childbirth, only to say a year later, “That wasn’t so bad. Let’s
have another,” we agreed that the trip from Boston to Fort Lauderdale had gone
well. Perhaps the rough edges were smoothed over by the chilled bottle of
champagne that greeted us in our cabin.
Things were about to
get much better.
*An aisle chair is
a narrow wheelchair designed to fit down the aisle of an airplane, depicted in
the photo at the top of this post. Also note that I had
checked my iBot wheelchair at the ticket counter, all the way through to Fort
Lauderdale. I like to travel with two wheelchairs.
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