Air travel

Before I got on my first flight, post-accident, air-travel made me incredibly anxious. It still does. I thought that I would be the annoying person, holding the line up while I set off every metal-detector and get the full pat-down treatment. I used to scoff at the people who would take the escalator instead of the stairs, the people who stand and not walk on moving-walkways. Now I am one of them.

Surprisingly, the titanium and surgical steel in my body does not set off the metal detector. However, my knee-brace does and at first I would keep it on while I walked through the detector and get searched. I then got pretty good at taking the brace off fairly quickly and non-disruptively, so I would take it off and put it through the X-ray machine. Now that I don't wear a knee-brace regularly, I don't have to worry about these things and I do feel slightly more liberated when I am at the airport. I am still self-conscious about my gait when I am carrying heavy bags (I've had to give in to the extortion of the SFO baggage cart) or when the gate is a long way from the security checkpoint.

I experience quite a bit of discomfort (a different kind to this discomfort) when I sit down for long-periods of time so I try to get aisle seats on the RHS of the plane so I can stick my left foot out.

Going to the loo on the plane is incredibly unappealing, even when your bowel/bladder functions are not impaired. I try not to drink/eat very much in the hours leading up to a flight so that I can avoid using the airplane toilet, but I'm sure I'll have to one of these days. If I do, I will use a long male-catheter so that I can cath standing up (hoo-rah!) - this is the only benefit to having a flaccid sphincter (yeah, that's what it is called). I did, more than just briefly, consider calling my blog that. But it probably would have turned up under searches for porn sites.

My leg-brace wasn't all bad. It did spark a conversation that led to a wonderful friendship with a really cool couple I would have had otherwise never interacted with (I don't have any other friends over 60 years old). It did let me board the plane early, although I did not really take advantage of that because  I would just feel douchey. Now that I don't wear my leg-brace, I guess I'm going to have to resort to making friends with my dazzling personality.