Driving Day
On Monday morning we packed up to head back to Oakland. This mainly consisted of Dacia packing up 90% of the stuff in the parents' room, walking over to the kids room to discover that they were still in bed, telling them to get up, walking downstairs to get coffee, walking upstairs to tell the kids "no for real get up now," and then heading back to our room with that delicious delicious coffee. The kids love packing to go home–they can grab clothes, toiletries, and tech by the fistful and just jam it into one of their oversized duffel bags.
With the right tools nothing is a crisis.
While the kids pack their bags with supreme chaos demon energy, I get to apply my overly meticulous packing style to my medical bag. Which, because I still want to signify my class and lifestyle to passers-by, is a repurposed ski touring bag from Swiss mountaineering equipment manufacturer Ortovox.
Turns out, the specialized equipment I now need (catheters, lubricant, pharmaceuticals, wipes, pads, blood pressure monitor, etc) all fit perfectly and therefore satisfyingly in the various pockets, sub-pockets, and pouches designed for backcountry rescue gear. Moreover the big openings designed to make access in heavy mountain gloves easier also make it easier for someone with very little core balance. And now that we're traveling more, I get to have the immense satisfaction of tweaking and tuning my packing list to meet the evolving needs of my injury
With the right tools nothing is a crisis.
After a tasty breakfast at Grits & Gravy in Downtown Portland we bundled into the car and aimed it south. I ate lightly, worried that my gastro-colic reflex might cause a nasty accident at some point in our ten-hour drive. This was a worry I carried with me (and largely kept to myself until now) for the entire ride.
There really is nothing that makes me feel more helpless and disabled than my bowels letting loose at an inopportune time. And just thinking through the logistics of cleaning me and the car, while on the road, with the kids watching, was enough to make me focus all my energy on keeping the ol' sphincter shut.
The ride was thankfully uneventful and relaxing (for me at least; Dacia will definitely have more to add). We stopped for gas a couple of times, we stopped for drive-through lunch (I again ate light), and we got home to Oakland a little more than nine hours after we left Portland. This is probably the longest ride I'm capable of doing in one day, and to be honest it did take a couple of days to recover fully. But I'm happy we did this trip and learned a bunch about how travel has changed for me and the family:
- you can do effective pressure reliefs in a car seat if you're willing to look weird to other drivers as you pass them,
- hotels can and should do everything they can to accommodate your injury level–just ask and stand firm,
- thoughtful accessibility features can occur anywhere (as can careless ones),
- friends will always want to push your wheelchair,
- well-executed accessibility infrastructure can make the disabled feel able, and even for a moment, that's a powerful feeling,
- when you encounter poorly-executed accessible features it is both acceptable and appropriate to yell "ACCESSIBILITY" in an upbeat sarcastic tone,
- and as always, nothing beats an amazing caretaker.
Next up: Dacia shares her thoughts on being an amazing caretaker and how absolutely exhausting (and satisfying) it is!