2012-8 Flowers & Gardens, Alabama
Hello
All,
Just prior to flying out of Alaska Miss Barb contracted a bad cold. We were anxious to get home and get her to our family doctor. The flight from Anchorage to Seattle went smoothly. However, the climbing and descending along with the change of cabin pressure seemed to drive the cold deep into her lungs—she was miserable and continually coughing.
In Seattle we considered laying over so that we could find an urgent care facility to see if we could get her started on some meds. This would require us trying to retrieve our luggage that was checked through to Atlanta, renting a car, finding an urgent care facility, waiting to see a doctor, and then getting a prescription filled. There was a good chance that all this would take more time than the flight to Atlanta. Barb made the decision that she wanted to continue on to Atlanta and Dave honored her wish. We had a hotel room reserved in Atlanta. We would drive home the next morning and get her into our family doctor. Had we known what was ahead we would have never made that decision!
Our flight out of Seattle departed on time. However, about an hour into the flight a lady sitting behind us started screaming for a flight attendant. Her husband, sitting directly behind Dave, couldn’t breathe, was suffering chest pain and had passed out. Flight attendants came running and then shortly thereafter started calling for a doctor over the PA system. A young doctor responded and started providing care for the gentleman. The doctor got him conscious again and then started administering nitroglycerin. He requested that flight attendants bring a bottle of emergency oxygen if they had it and they complied. The oxygen helped the gentleman to breathe easier.
Dave turned to Miss Barb and advised her to not be surprised if we made an emergency landing before long. Shortly thereafter, the captain of the aircraft came to assess the situation and after talking with the doctor he went back to the cockpit. In a few minutes the captain announced over the PA system that a passenger had suffered a medical emergency. He went on to say we would be making an unscheduled landing at the nearest location to us with a trauma center, which was Bozeman, Montana.
The airport at Bozeman is at about 4,500’ elevation and the longest runway is less than 9,000 feet. We started descending fairly rapidly. Since we were only an hour into a four and a half hour flight the aircraft was still carrying a good amount of fuel. To our knowledge excess fuel was not dropped and we for sure didn’t spend any time flying around burning off fuel. We hit the runway so hard that you would have thought the aircraft wheels could have gone through the wings. Passengers onboard screamed upon impact! It was the hardest landing we have ever experienced in an airplane.
Our aircraft did not go to the terminal. Instead it was parked on the tarmac where an ambulance was waiting. Paramedics came on board, and talked to the patient and the doctor. They carried the patient off the airplane and his family of six went with him.
A short time later the captain announced that due to the extremely hard landing that the entire aircraft would have to undergo a comprehensive inspection by ground personnel before it would be authorized for departure. And, we would have to remain on the aircraft! To make a long story short, two hours later we were cleared to proceed on our journey. The remainder of our flight went without incident.
After retrieving our car from long term parking we set out for our motel. It was a hot and humid evening in the South. Upon reaching our motel the manager told us that Atlanta had suffered severe thunderstorms throughout the day and that they were operating on a standby generator. Their computer was down so they could not retrieve our reservation. However, rooms were available but there would be no air conditioning, cable TV, or internet service. He said he would cancel our reservation when power returned if we chose to find another motel. We decided that we could do without internet and cable but not air conditioning.
Exhausted we started driving towards home. After about 45 minutes we got into an area that had electrical power so we stopped and secured a motel room for the night. The next day we continued our drive home and then got Barb into our family doctor. He gave her some breathing treatments and put her on meds. In about ten days she was back to her bubbly self.
Late spring and early summer is a beautiful time of year in the South. Flowers and trees are in bloom and it is simply lovely. In our yard the gladiolus, purple coneflowers, mums and roses were blooming.
Gladiolus come in such a variety of colors.
Just prior to flying out of Alaska Miss Barb contracted a bad cold. We were anxious to get home and get her to our family doctor. The flight from Anchorage to Seattle went smoothly. However, the climbing and descending along with the change of cabin pressure seemed to drive the cold deep into her lungs—she was miserable and continually coughing.
In Seattle we considered laying over so that we could find an urgent care facility to see if we could get her started on some meds. This would require us trying to retrieve our luggage that was checked through to Atlanta, renting a car, finding an urgent care facility, waiting to see a doctor, and then getting a prescription filled. There was a good chance that all this would take more time than the flight to Atlanta. Barb made the decision that she wanted to continue on to Atlanta and Dave honored her wish. We had a hotel room reserved in Atlanta. We would drive home the next morning and get her into our family doctor. Had we known what was ahead we would have never made that decision!
Our flight out of Seattle departed on time. However, about an hour into the flight a lady sitting behind us started screaming for a flight attendant. Her husband, sitting directly behind Dave, couldn’t breathe, was suffering chest pain and had passed out. Flight attendants came running and then shortly thereafter started calling for a doctor over the PA system. A young doctor responded and started providing care for the gentleman. The doctor got him conscious again and then started administering nitroglycerin. He requested that flight attendants bring a bottle of emergency oxygen if they had it and they complied. The oxygen helped the gentleman to breathe easier.
Dave turned to Miss Barb and advised her to not be surprised if we made an emergency landing before long. Shortly thereafter, the captain of the aircraft came to assess the situation and after talking with the doctor he went back to the cockpit. In a few minutes the captain announced over the PA system that a passenger had suffered a medical emergency. He went on to say we would be making an unscheduled landing at the nearest location to us with a trauma center, which was Bozeman, Montana.
The airport at Bozeman is at about 4,500’ elevation and the longest runway is less than 9,000 feet. We started descending fairly rapidly. Since we were only an hour into a four and a half hour flight the aircraft was still carrying a good amount of fuel. To our knowledge excess fuel was not dropped and we for sure didn’t spend any time flying around burning off fuel. We hit the runway so hard that you would have thought the aircraft wheels could have gone through the wings. Passengers onboard screamed upon impact! It was the hardest landing we have ever experienced in an airplane.
Our aircraft did not go to the terminal. Instead it was parked on the tarmac where an ambulance was waiting. Paramedics came on board, and talked to the patient and the doctor. They carried the patient off the airplane and his family of six went with him.
A short time later the captain announced that due to the extremely hard landing that the entire aircraft would have to undergo a comprehensive inspection by ground personnel before it would be authorized for departure. And, we would have to remain on the aircraft! To make a long story short, two hours later we were cleared to proceed on our journey. The remainder of our flight went without incident.
After retrieving our car from long term parking we set out for our motel. It was a hot and humid evening in the South. Upon reaching our motel the manager told us that Atlanta had suffered severe thunderstorms throughout the day and that they were operating on a standby generator. Their computer was down so they could not retrieve our reservation. However, rooms were available but there would be no air conditioning, cable TV, or internet service. He said he would cancel our reservation when power returned if we chose to find another motel. We decided that we could do without internet and cable but not air conditioning.
Exhausted we started driving towards home. After about 45 minutes we got into an area that had electrical power so we stopped and secured a motel room for the night. The next day we continued our drive home and then got Barb into our family doctor. He gave her some breathing treatments and put her on meds. In about ten days she was back to her bubbly self.
Late spring and early summer is a beautiful time of year in the South. Flowers and trees are in bloom and it is simply lovely. In our yard the gladiolus, purple coneflowers, mums and roses were blooming.
Gladiolus come in such a variety of colors.
Bumblebees
really like our purple coneflowers. In our eyes they make for neat photos.
And
a quick check of our Eastern Bluebird houses revealed that we had new
residents.
Our
primary goal, upon returning home, was to get our home sold and relocate to Idaho.
Moving to Idaho would put us closer to family and would geographically center
us for exploring numerous national parks.
With the downturn of the economy we knew it was not an ideal time to sell—as it was a buyer’s market. Our choices were to hold off a few years and wait for the market to come back or drop our asking price and sell now. At our age we didn’t want to wait for the market to come back. We chose to drop our asking price to just above our break even number and then take advantage of the buyer’s market on the other end in Idaho. We contacted our realtor and put our plan into action. Within a few weeks we accepted an offer on our house. We began packing boxes while waiting for the closing.
Shortly thereafter we received a devastating call advising us that our daughter in Alaska had suffered severe back pain, was paralyzed again, had been medivaced to Anchorage and now was being medivaced to Seattle, Washington. A sibling was accompanying her on the flight. We found ourselves between a rock and a hard place. We wanted to be with our daughter but we had business to attend to with the closing of the house sale and the move across the country.
A world renowned neurosurgeon in Seattle discovered that our daughter was originally misdiagnosed with Guillain-Barre Syndrome. He determined she was suffering from a fistula in her back near her spine. In layman terms a fistula is when an artery and a vein grow together. Arteries have thicker walls and pump at a higher pressure than veins. The artery overpowers the vein collapsing it which causes blood to pool. Pooling blood puts pressure on the spine resulting in severe pain and paralysis. He scheduled her for immediate surgery. He was able to go up through an artery in the groin (similar to a heart angioplasty) into the fistula and separate the artery and vein and seal the incision. She would be in ICU for a week and then placed into a physical therapy unit at the hospital in Seattle for a month before returning to Alaska. Her siblings would be with her during her stay in Seattle. We decided that would give us enough time to close on the house and move across country. We could then fly back to Alaska to be with her through her recovery.
We won’t go through all the trials and tribulation we went through in getting the house closed and then getting our household effects packed and loaded. Hence to say we were able to accomplish the feat. We spent our last night in Alabama in a motel before setting off on our journey. We called ourselves the modern day “Beverly Hillbillies” during our trek. Dave was driving our dually truck pulling our 29-foot cargo trailer and Barb was driving the largest Penske truck we could rent towing our car on a trailer.
Here we are departing Alabama.
With the downturn of the economy we knew it was not an ideal time to sell—as it was a buyer’s market. Our choices were to hold off a few years and wait for the market to come back or drop our asking price and sell now. At our age we didn’t want to wait for the market to come back. We chose to drop our asking price to just above our break even number and then take advantage of the buyer’s market on the other end in Idaho. We contacted our realtor and put our plan into action. Within a few weeks we accepted an offer on our house. We began packing boxes while waiting for the closing.
Shortly thereafter we received a devastating call advising us that our daughter in Alaska had suffered severe back pain, was paralyzed again, had been medivaced to Anchorage and now was being medivaced to Seattle, Washington. A sibling was accompanying her on the flight. We found ourselves between a rock and a hard place. We wanted to be with our daughter but we had business to attend to with the closing of the house sale and the move across the country.
A world renowned neurosurgeon in Seattle discovered that our daughter was originally misdiagnosed with Guillain-Barre Syndrome. He determined she was suffering from a fistula in her back near her spine. In layman terms a fistula is when an artery and a vein grow together. Arteries have thicker walls and pump at a higher pressure than veins. The artery overpowers the vein collapsing it which causes blood to pool. Pooling blood puts pressure on the spine resulting in severe pain and paralysis. He scheduled her for immediate surgery. He was able to go up through an artery in the groin (similar to a heart angioplasty) into the fistula and separate the artery and vein and seal the incision. She would be in ICU for a week and then placed into a physical therapy unit at the hospital in Seattle for a month before returning to Alaska. Her siblings would be with her during her stay in Seattle. We decided that would give us enough time to close on the house and move across country. We could then fly back to Alaska to be with her through her recovery.
We won’t go through all the trials and tribulation we went through in getting the house closed and then getting our household effects packed and loaded. Hence to say we were able to accomplish the feat. We spent our last night in Alabama in a motel before setting off on our journey. We called ourselves the modern day “Beverly Hillbillies” during our trek. Dave was driving our dually truck pulling our 29-foot cargo trailer and Barb was driving the largest Penske truck we could rent towing our car on a trailer.
Here we are departing Alabama.
We
used hand held radios to stay in touch with each other. When one of us would
get sleepy or needed to make a potty break we’d give the other a shout. The 100
to 108 degree daytime temperatures through the plains states were hard on us.
This
was Miss Barb’s view for the 5-day trip to Idaho. She was such a trooper.
Yes,
Barb took the above photo while driving the truck. Not the smartest thing to
do. Upon arriving in Boise we rented a motel room for five days. During this
time we found a storage facility where we could rent space to park our truck
and cargo trailer. At the same facility we rented a large storage unit for our
household effects that were in the Penske truck. A high school buddy of Dave’s
that lives in the area put together a crew to help us unload the Penske truck.
These young men were much appreciated as we were exhausted. After turning in
the Penske truck and trailer we then hopped in our car and drove to Seattle
where we caught a flight back to Alaska.
Until next time,
Dave & Barb
The Traveling Browns
Until next time,
Dave & Barb
The Traveling Browns