For much of the last week, I’ve had my eyes cast eastward to the mid-Atlantic. In about 10 days, I’m supposed to lead a tour of veterans and other travellers to Holland to take in an event there. It’s been 65 years since the liberation of the Netherlands. The Dutch have a big party planned and we’re invited.
Problem is, smoke and ash from that unpronounceable volcano in Iceland have thrown up a barrier – literally and figuratively. Air travel may not be possible come May 1 when we’re supposed to fly to Amsterdam. I have not been a happy camper.
In the middle of my worrying over such big events, I got an email from a friend.
“I’m out,” was all it said in the subject line. Inside it elaborated briefly that my friend was out of hospital, resting at a mutual friend’s home. “Things went well, I believe,” he concluded.
It had been a couple of weeks since doctors had informed this friend that he had a torn retina. They further told him that the obstruction to his vision in one eye was in fact an accumulation of blood and that he’d better take it easy while they figured out what had to be done. There were a number of anxious days, being bumped around from hospital to hospital and lots of phone calls, messages left and emails as we stayed in touch.
“Every attempt to correct the problem,” he wrote us late last week, “has ended up in disappointment … This means they’ll have to go in and operate.”
It was about the time I learned of my friend’s vision loss, that I realized the volcano had brought passenger air travel between the United Kingdom and the Mediterranean to the sharpest halt since 9-11. I joined the countless thousands worried about getting in or out of Europe. I heard the horror stories of jet engines potentially shutting down amid such airborne debris. I heard about trains and boats and the Chunnel being overwhelmed by the resulting ground rush. And I even read the story about British comedian John Cleese hiring a taxicab (for about $5,000) to travel from Oslo to Brussels.
Then, on about the fourth or fifth day of the aviation world’s paralysis over the Eyjafjallajokull volcano eruption, I connected with another friend who was battling a serious respiratory problem. Between erratic heart rhythms and high blood pressure, he had gone through a series of hospitalizations that had left him in serious condition and his family worried sick about his future. But he too, with the support of family and friends – as well as a capable health system – had managed to come through a procedure safely.
“My family’s done yeoman duty,” he told me in the middle of it all. “But I’m finally feeling better and optimistic everything’s going to be fine.”
There’s nothing like a real crisis in our lives to put the trumped up crises into perspective, I thought. And I remembered those long, horrible months my family – like thousands of other families – endured the agony of my parents’ failing health.
My father had slipped into a battle with aphasia at the same time that the SARS outbreak had the Ontario Ministry of Health in near panic. And my mother nearly died of kidney failure the same night as some people in Ontario argued that the implementation of Family Day would bankrupt the province.
The battles that had appeared paramount in the moments before a family crisis, nearly disappeared in the realities of survival at the family bedside.
In the cases of my two friends – battling through health issues – there was a wonderful coincidence. Just before I sat to write this column, the one with the eye trauma said he had come through preliminary surgery with a good prognosis. “I’ve been told to rest and recuperate for the next week,” he told me on the phone, “so I’ve got my head down and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.” No sooner had I wrapped up that conversation, when I phoned my other friend and he told me he’d been napping following his latest treatment. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he repeated.
I sighed with equal relief. Then I checked online about the volcano.
“Heathrow reopened … and air traffic across the continent lurched back to life,” an NDTV report said Tuesday. “Flights took off from Paris’s Charles de Gaulle and Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport…”
My heart rate slipped back to normal and my eyes focused on the here and now. My friends are on the mend. We will probably get to Holland. And everything’s in perspective again.