Unlucky Seat 13B

Just a bit of background: we’re traveling, hanging out, and helping my little mommy celebrate the big 9-0. We had a blast today at the party, but I started the day feeling a bit… rocky.

As this is likely to be a really gross and offensive post in which graphic descriptions of alarums and excursions in one’s personal innards play a major part, the following disclaimer is offered as a public service. If you have delicate sensibilities and a weak stomach for yucky detail, perhaps this picture of nice bunnies and kitties from Hulk’s Diary will please you. If you wish to do a little vicarious personal spelunking, read on…

I feel sorry for the next person to sit in this seat, because gastro-intestinal distress at 33,000 feet is never fun for the sufferer, or for anyone within range. We’re on our way to Salt Lake for the big celebration of Mom’s 90th birthday, and as soon as we boarded and got ready for takeoff I started feeling…internally regretful of the otherwise yummy bratwurst sandwich we had at the Berghoff O’Hare restaurant. I’m better now, but for a tense span of time there I thought I was going to pass out from pain or explode messily all over row 13. Something about carbonated beverages and air travel and I don’t agree – the other two always gang up on me. Nothing truly humiliating happened in this seat, but it would be a fine place for a Stick-Up just as a courtesy to the cleaning crew and its next occupant.

Well, I’m not going to explode, I think; the crisis seems to have passed. David may wish we had a balcony or something so that I could sleep outside tonight, though. We’ve got another 90 minutes before we land, according to Fred Jr, the handheld GPS unit.

Other than my little problem with noxious fumes, it’s been a somewhat interesting travel experience thus far. We arrived at O’Hare with plenty of time and got boarding passes, but found that our pre-reserved seats weren’t together. At least we had some, because a couple of months ago when I booked and ticketed, I couldn’t even get seat assignments. Then we saw that the flight was delayed a half hour. So we went to the concourse and had something to eat at the Berghoff, which seemed like a really good idea at the time.

In retrospect, maybe it’s a blessing that they were out of sauerkraut…

It’s a nice little faux-bistro that serves mostly sandwiches, but with a few little touches that evoke the Germanic heritage of Chicago’s oldest restaurant – they had German potato salad and the bratwurst and Black Forest ham for sandwiches, and they had their signature beers and root beers. I was pretty happy with the meal, even though I’d already had a somewhat rumbly tumbly. I ignored the faint warning signs – it was as if Robbie the robot was whispering “danger, danger” and only waved his arms slightly.

Then we found a power outlet so David could tinker with the laptop, and I went off with my iPod and fooled around with my little travel journal that had an unfinished entry dating from the end of our last trip in June. After noticing a couple of Moslem men praying at the end of the C concourse, presumably in the direction of Mecca, we found seats in the gate area and waited for the plane to arrive, and all the other normalities of modern air travel – listening for announcements, keeping an eye on our stuff, and so on. David got our seats switched at the podium so that we were together rather than a row apart, and then finally very quickly the plane arrived, was emptied, cleaned, we lined up and boarded.

There was an uncomfortable incident before departure – there had been an equipment change and some other people had switched seats around just before everyone got on. The gate agent made an announcement to the effect that there might be some duplicate seat assignments – it sounded like they’d had to shuffle things around after people had already gotten boarding passes, and some people hadn’t been advised of changes due to the somewhat rushed boarding process. That’s when a woman who had been assigned a particular seat (an aisle, I think, behind us), and she and her husband had been split up and assigned window seats elsewhere. There was a scene. They stood in the aisle, wanting their originally assigned seats, which had been re-assigned to a family group in order to keep their party all together. The woman became quite insistent and said loudly “I am not comfortable
sitting here.” There was a short and rather intense little pause, because the family group looked like they might be East Indian, and she’d be sitting amongst them in the window seat, while her husband was elsewhere. So the flight attendant talked to her, reasoned to her, apologized to her, and became increasingly more firm, finally graduating to “I’m not going to stand here and argue with you, this aircraft cannot take off until you take a seat somewhere and then after we are in the air we can switch you around with a solitary traveler so you can get something more to your liking.” The woman actually objected and said something like “No, I want this seat (waving her original boarding stub) and this man is sitting in my seat.” At this point, the flight attendant or gate agent started to check the manifest for a singleton she could move right then, when a young man popped up and said “That’s okay, I’m flying alone, I’ll switch so you can sit down and we can get going, I don’t care, and we need to take off so I can meet my wife, who’s driving to Salt Lake alone from Seattle. I don’t want to sit here any longer.”

Mollified, the argumentative couple finally got settled, There were about 3 more people whose seats had also been changed who piped up very quickly with “I don’t care, I’ll sit anywhere.” Finally, everyone was buckled up and off we took.

Pretty much immediately after that was when I started feeling uncomfortable. As soon as the “fasten seat belt” light came on, I made a tactical retreat and got myself sorted in what constitutes privacy on an aircraft – as quickly as possible, because this tiny little jet only has one aft washroom. I tried not to hold up the line for any longer than necessary… honest.

I really thought for a few minutes that I was about to be one of those unfortunates that’s the star of a small, 3 column inch news story – “United flight diverted to Cedar Rapids, IA in medical emergency,” but as these things often happen, everything came out all right in the end. 😉

UPDATE: As soon as we deplaned and I started walking to the rental car agency, the pain returned. More agonized fun ensued, although eventually (like 90 minutes later), the pressure was relieved, shall we say. Ah, the relief! Sleep eluded me for most of the night, but at least I no longer felt like a pressure cooker with a stuck valve. It was a little late to ask David to go to the Walgreens down the street and find me some tummy stuff, so I toughed it out.

Next trip, I’m bringing half our medicine cabinet with me, becuase toughing it out is for the birds.