In my travels I've experienced various degrees of jetlag, the most extreme being when I visited Europe with my grandmother several years ago. We were flying in to
Schiphol for a tour of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. My grandmother took a connecting flight from South Carolina to Dulles where we met up for the flight to Amsterdam. She, a seasoned traveler who has led countless tour groups of the elderly, was late for her flight's check-in because the driver who had reliably driven her to the airport for years suddenly went missing. She showed up at the gate and was told by the lady manning it that she would not be able to fly since she arrived only 15 minutes prior to departure. Anyone who knows or knows of my grandmother can well imagine the reaction this assertion got. With a combination of Southern charm and some arm-twisting the woman allowed that she could board the flight, but then scornfully told her she (an 85-year old) would have to carry all of her checked baggage to the tarmac.
As she was riding an escalator to the jet, one of her bags began to tumble and she badly scraped her leg trying to keep her balance. She arrived in Dulles and I tried my best to convince her that we should seek out the first aid station because this was quite more than a scratch, but my grandmother does not like missing flights and insisted that she would be fine.
We arrived at 7am local time seven hours later and, by this time, her wound had tightened-up and she could barely walk. We had thirty minutes to meet our tour group and from where we arrived there were no shuttles to the main entrance, so we had to walk on the people-movers over a mile. My grandmother was obviously in pain and I was finally able to win her over to the idea of seeking out the first aid station.
At this point I will pause the narrative to underscore that I am not a morning person, and, at this point, I was trapped in a jetlag limbo of no caffeine, signs in a foreign language, and an endless amount of walking. My body protested that it couldn't possibly be morning, while my mind was shouting for sleep. Paraphrasing William Gibson, my soul was still traveling the Atlantic while my body was in Amsterdam, but I would relive that jetlag every day if it would rewind time.
We reached the first aid station where the attendant (I wouldn't call her a nurse for reasons which will become clear) gave her a bandage to the tune of $25 and a wheelchair. She then advised my grandmother
not to wash the wound for several days. Hearing that, I said thanks for the con job and began wheeling my grandmother to the entrance with my bags over my shoulder, rolling her big bag behind me with one hand while pushing the wheelchair with the other. We arrived in time to meet the tour group and my grandmother regaled them with the travail of her trip in the way that only a true Southern lady can. She really was the hit of the tour from that point forward and we grew close in that one week in a way that is hard to describe - we'd never really seen eye-to-eye on many things, me being too similar to my dad - but we reached an understanding during our stay and I found a respect for her that has only increased.
I learned later that right before the tour her doctor had discovered an odd lump that he thought was a hemorrhoid. After the trip we would learn it was cancerous. The cancer spread from there to her liver and after years of fighting she is now in her last months.
Why these thoughts? Sitting in a hotel in Nova Scotia, with only an hour between me and Eastern, what I have discovered is that your body never really adjusts to only an hour of difference, there are no cues for it to pick up on. I feel like a wraith walking in rooms where the living abide and, contrary to my nature, I've woken at 5am every day with a head swimming with thoughts, suddenly a morning person.
