On the road to recovery - Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Harmonie
Don and Anne Myers
Wed 3 Mar 2010 00:19
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37:48.662S 145:00.700E
It's happened again. Time has
slipped by so fast that we didn't realize we were in a new month
until two days after the fact. It's slightly embarrassing to admit, but we
have entered a state of complete cluelessness regarding the date. The
same holds true for the day of the week. Based on past experience, we
would have said this was only possible when out at sea or
when cruising from thatch-hut-covered island to thatch-hut-covered
island. Not so. Apparently the same pure state of date/day
cluelessness can be easily achieved while on the road to
recovery. More specifically, the road to recovery that runs
between Melbourne and Brisbane.
We flew to Melbourne from Brisbane as planned on
February 2nd. Aside from a moment of panic when the Virgin Airlines
check-in guy started looking through the Virgin Airlines rule book to see if in
fact it was within company policy for a man with a broken limb to board one of
their airplanes, all was well. The panic dissipated once it was
established that Don's surgery occurred more than seven days before. Any
less and there might have been a problem. The truth was, Don's
surgery happened only six days before, but when asked about the date, Don
and I smiled, nodded and said in unison, "Yes! The surgery was at least
seven days ago." Who says a little white lie now and then is a bad
thing? The Virgin Airlines check-in guy also wanted to be sure that Don's
broken ankle and surgery were indeed unexpected
(meaning both happened after we booked the flight).
We laughed when he asked us this thinking it was really odd for someone to
ask if a broken ankle was unexpected, but the airline guy didn't seem
to find it funny. Shortly after the Virgin Airlines policy book was closed
and put away, we packed Don up in a wheelchair and rolled him through security,
up the lift (Aussie-talk for elevator) and out to the gate.
Once at the gate, we saw the Melbourne-bound
airplane sitting below us outside the window. There it was, a nice, big,
shiny jet, squatting all by itself - an island in the middle of the
tarmac. There was no attached jet-way. No
jet-way! Correction. There was a jet-way at the gate, but
it had a very steep set of metal stairs jutting out from its end leading
down to the ground. We gazed from the stunted jet-way with its
evil-looking staircase to the squatting airplane with its
own sinister stairway leading up to the fuselage door. Hmmm...
How exactly do handicapped people deal with this kind of thing? It
was about then that a new appreciation for the Americans with Disabilities
Act started to take hold in our hearts.
I parked wheelchair-bound Don in the waiting
area so he could elevate his throbbing ankle on a
nearby chair and jogged up to the desk to talk to one of the
agents. She was extremely sympathetic, and grew even more so when she
realized the lift that services the gates in this part of the terminal was
not working. "We'll have to wheel your husband back to the main
terminal, down the lift, out through security and then under the
terminal and out to the plane with a security escort. We need to
leave now because it will take about 20 minutes to do all that and your
flight leaves in 25." Ok! The two of us jog-walked over to the
parked Don, explained the situation, and started zooming
(rolling) back to security. Once there, it took five very long
minutes to sort out who was going to take on the task of security
escort for the handicapped. Once this was sorted (Aussie-talk for
'figured out') our happy little group rolled Don under the terminal and out to
the plane. Once we arrived at the foot of the airplane stairway,
the ground crew rolled a funky sort of lift truck over. Don stood up
on one foot, hobbled into the lift truck cage with his crutches
where the staff securely shackled him in, and up he went to the top of
the stairway with a slow motion whoosh. Don then hobbled into the plane
and down the aisle to his row 12 seat while most of the passengers in
the completely full flight looked on with varying degrees of annoyance or
curiosity showing on their faces. Shew! Never has an airplane
boarding been so complicated. For us anyway.
The rest of our three hour flight went
smoothly and we were met in the baggage claim by Sue and John, who had just
returned to Melbourne that morning on the red-eye from Hong Kong. Shortly
thereafter, we arrived at Sue and John's luxurious sixth floor apartment in
the fashionable Richmond section of Melbourne. An exhausted Don collapsed
on the antique sage-colored velvet daybed surrounded by fluffy brocade cushions
and a fabulous collection of art (picture 1). The road to
recovery had officially begun.
Anne
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