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.

For part 2, click here.

*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.