Traveling always involves a lot of logistics. Last week, all the more so. Months ago, I had planned a three-day, Sunday-through-Tuesday business trip to NYC. The first two days were devoted to board meetings for a philanthropy of which I am a trustee, including a day of strategic planning that I had helped to organize. The third was a full day meeting with clients. I had piggy-backed that third day onto the first two in order to save myself physical wear and tear from traveling to Manhattan twice in one month.
What I had not been able to anticipate, however, was the state of my hands and my back (of which I have written a lot in recent posts). What to do? I couldn’t/didn’t want to cancel out, but I wasn’t sure how to manage. Would I be able to handle my luggage? How would I keep my hands from getting more damaged or protect myself from picking up yet another infection?
My initial plan to protect my hands from lugging a suitcase on and off trains and through subways—use a backpack—was unworkable. With all the supplies I needed to bring for hand maintenance, personal hygiene, medications, etcetera, even packing very lightly for clothing and using Al’s nylon backpack, the thing was way too heavy and unwieldy for my slow-healing, strained back. So I switched over to my wheeling carry-on. But what to do about getting around?
Aha! Obviously, I had to rethink ground transportation. Time to rely on taxis or Lyft or other options. Saving money was not as important as saving my health. And if I did use the subway, I decided I’d only do it if there was elevator access or easily walkable ramps.
As for pulling my bag along Manhattan sidewalks, I planned to keep that to a minimum, not only because of the crowds, but also because many of the streets and sidewalks in Midtown are either under construction or aging and in need of repair.
Sometimes I improvised. When one of the trains I took had split upper and lower deck seating, I stayed in the middle on a jump seat to avoid lugging my luggage and made friends with the conductor, who helped take my bag off the train to a lower platform.
Everything worked out better than expected. From my Monday meeting, located at a Wall Street law firm, I was able to get a courtesy car ride to my Midtown hotel. On Tuesday, I simply checked my bag at the hotel, went to my meeting in Chelsea, and picked it up on my way back to Grand Central, which was a five minute walk down Park Avenue. Train transfers were relatively easy. The one time I used the subway, I only had to carry my bag up and down about six steps.
As for my back, I wore a thermal heat pack all three days and brought my deflatable back pillow to every meeting. I made sure to keep up with regular doses of acetaminophen and ibuprofen. And I took meticulous care of my hands.
It was a long trip on my own when I wasn’t feeling my best, but successful in the end. As my train pulled into New Haven, where I had parked in the overnight garage, I was exhausted and relieved. I couldn’t wait to get in my car and drive home. But. The one thing I hadn’t planned for, the inevitable travel glitch that had nothing to do with my health issues and everything to do with mindfulness or the lack thereof was this: I’d left an interior light on in my car when I’d parked three days prior, and the battery was dead. An hour later, AAA arrived and charged it right up, thank goodness, but I was not a happy camper during the wait.
Successful travel, especially when you deal with chronic health issues, requires a lot of advance planning. But the unexpected is inevitable. You can be certain I will always check interior light status whenever I leave my car from now on. But the other lesson reinforced from my trip was that I can’t anticipate everything. Nonetheless, when traveling alone, I can trust myself to solve it.
Evelyn Herwitz blogs weekly about living fully with chronic disease, the inside of baseballs, turtles and frogs, J.S. Bach, the meaning of life and whatever else she happens to be thinking about at livingwithscleroderma.com.
