Thursday, October 22, 2015 Back to Denver

Oh this is the most endless day of my life! We rise at 5 AM, taking an overpriced taxi to the airport. We sit and wait. Isn’t that what flying is all about? Hurry up and wait. We board the plane back to Frankfurt, packed in like sardines. I have a nice conversation with the gentleman next to me, a German national inspecting pet food factories the world over. Considering how long ago I learned German, I’m happy that I can generally explain in German anything he misses in English or Spanish.

Landing in Frankfurt, an aisle chair arrives to take me off the plane. Bird vociferously greets me on the jetway and I transfer. We have our own personal Lufthansa minder. She takes us through the endless Frankfurt airport to our next plane. Frankfurt has set up its airport so that you roll through every duty-free option existing on the planet. My poor body battles the assault of foul-smelling, headache-inducing, overwhelming perfume.

But hurry up and wait again! The plane will board late. Ugh! Keith looks for food, eventually settling on a Big Mac. The sandwich looks and smells as disgusting as I recall McDonalds’ food being. I eat the pickles.

Why when I fly, do I find the world filled with other handicapped people or just people who claim they can’t walk? Obviously, they fail to comprehend my great importance. Ha! Seriously, folks, walk as long as you can. Otherwise, you just slow things down for everyone, including yourself. Given Lufthansa’s prices, I fully understand the desire to be pampered.

Lufthansa first tries to take Bird, asking me for my rental papers. I respond, “Nein!  Mein Rollstuhl!” Acquiescing to my retaining Bird, Lufthansa then pushes us through a door onto the jetway. Other cripples have crowded the space, each pushing to be first on the plane. For the life of me, I will never understand why a person wants to be first to board. You will be sitting in a very confined space for hours, especially if you cross an ocean! None of the other cripples need an aisle chair. By process of elimination, I am eternally first on and last off.

I greet the plane employees with my severely limited German. In their amazed excitement, they respond and I understand! I explain that I learned a bit of German 40 years ago in high school. As German is now seldom taught in public schools, the employees respond that for me, it must be like a mother tongue. They are over kind. Mein Deutsch ist sehr schrecklich!

Loaded via aisle chair onto the plane again, we watch the hordes of people board. Two older perfume-sodden women approach our larger seats, saying “We have both ordered aisle seats! How could we possibly be next to them?” I fervently hope that they move into the aisle seats, one away from us. (Our larger seats cost $100 extra each. On the way TO Frankfurt, the only unsold seat on the entire plane lie next to us. YEAH!) A long conversation between the women and Lufthansa employees ensues. The result? The women, too twitterpated to correctly read their tickets, plop down next to us. 

Shit!

The closer perfume-intoxicated woman notices that I never stand up. Inquiring minds being what they are, she asks me why. I admit to being crippled.

Mistake! She then begins telling me how to live my life. Obviously, a woman who can’t find her clearly marked seat on a 747 knows more about living with MS than I do. And I am looking forward to ten hours of this?! Lord help me!!!

Upon being subjected to incompetent, unwanted advice, I do have choices:

1.     Ambien

2.    Telling people to shut the fuck up

3.    Changing the subject

4.    Doing my very best to ignore them

5.    Explaining and justifying my extremely personal medical choices

Well, I’m out of Ambien, if I tell her to shut up (which in retrospect I should have done) I have ten hours of ice next to me. I take the passive aggressive way out, repeatedly change the subject and then bury myself in Lufthansa’s personal TV.

Lufthansa gives each person their own personal TV set where you can choose movies, TV shows or other things. But you can only watch TV so long.

Should I defend and explain my personal medical decisions? My life and choices remain my own, absolutely none of anyone else's business. 

So, I end up absorbing this woman’s ignorant advice, idiotic drivel and poor behavior for ten hours, swallowing my smoldering anger. She assails me with rude, unrequested advice, regaling me with tales of the inherently obvious. Climbing into a wheelchair eliminates fifty IQ points, so anyone knows more about being a cripple than I do. I keep the peace as I’ve been taught to do, no matter the cost to myself.

I am trapped, lacking viable options. I pray for the flight to end. What do I want? Just for people to keep their mouths shut when they know nothing about progressive MS. For other subjects, I don’t ask for competence. After all, I live in a country that elected a pervert as president.

At last Denver! Not a moment too soon for my fleeting sanity! We arrive in the late afternoon here. Lufthansa provides another aisle chair, then shoos us through customs. We end up by the luggage. Spaced out, we finally realize that the entire planeful of people has passed us when we note the German flight crew walking by. Bear rouses himself, shaking off his weariness. He gathers our suitcases but discovers that the airline has left Tinky the walker upstairs, despite promises to the contrary. We contact the baggage people. After half an hour or so the walker appears. We leave DIA 2 ½ hours after we landed.

Walking out, we find a taxi. We don’t need a special taxi because the huge America taxi easily accommodates all our junk.

Our Spain adventure and the Trips for Crips blog ends here. I now offer an epilogue before I return to writing my memoir.

In the time since, the multiple sclerosis has, as ever, turned my body into a walking time bomb. “Tick, tick, tick,” I hear even in my sleep. 

So, is Spain the last trip? Unfortunately, the answer is probably yes. Since returning home in November 2015, the MS attacked viciously. We have not had a particularly easy year. My health has deteriorated significantly. Upon our return, I lost a lot of core strength, speech, and the ability to walk behind my walker. (To travel affordably via Airbnb, I must be able to walk from the bed where I sleep to the toilet. The disease has now stolen that ability.)

I spent the winter of 2015-2016 sick with one illness after another. The coup de grace for travel came in April 2016 when I fell getting into my wheelchair, breaking my wrist. I began to envy the dead, never a good thing. With progressive MS, if you don’t use something daily, you lose that function. The wrist healed, but I lost the ability to transfer in and out of my wheelchair on to minor things like the bed or the toilet.

So I have lost most autonomy and have unfortunately reached the point where I require assistance every hour or so. My wonderful fellow animals care for me. But I know everyone needs a break. We have hired an aide who comes on Tuesdays (at great expense). Paul cares for me on Saturdays. Keith gets two days off to golf or ski.

It has taken me quite a while, but I have again adapted to this reduced mobility. I am, after all, still alive.

MS has forced us to add a large handicap-accessible bathroom/bedroom in the former attached garage. The beautiful room has consumed our remaining wealth. The minute you say disabled, the same as if you say wedding, the price skyrockets. The number of people doing their damnedest to suck the lifeblood out of cripples truly amazes me. Probably all voted for Trump. (No, I’m NOT happy about November’s election results. The election was good for pot, legalized suicide and Trump. Coincidence?)

Before everything fell apart, I very much wanted to visit the Hermitage (St. Petersburg), the last museum on my bucket list. Fate had other things in store for me. MS has stolen my remaining health and wealth. Currently, we have no travel plans. But the boys have become accustomed to transferring me on and off of the toilet. So you never know!

Previously, we traveled inexpensively using Airbnb.  For $90 a night, you generally rent someone’s flat complete with a kitchen and washing machine. My transfer and walking inabilities have closed this to us. (Our Spain vacation cost us $9k for 3 people taking 3 leisurely weeks in Spain, including airfare) I HATE bad motels and food, but we may have been reduced to that. And I am disgusted with the massive expense of traveling in the States. Obviously, I must get over this before we contemplate future travel.

A year later, Spain appears as a glowing gracious dream, slowly fading, like the last sunbeam dancing across the water just before the sun disappears below the edge of the ocean.