FEB-A-2
MY LAUNCH OF A MEDICAL MISSION
AT THE SAME COUNTER IN RONALD REAGAN DCA AIRPORT
AS THE LAST, UNDER DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES,
ON SEPTEMBER 11,
DEPARTING AFTER ARRANGING FOR SOME STUDENTS FOR INDIA
AND PLEADING THE CASE OF ANOTHER MALAWI TRAVELER,
AND POSTING THE LAST MINUTE ITEMS OF URGENT BUSINESS
TO BE CONDUCTED IN MY ABSENCE
Jan. 30, 2002
Here I am, again! It is never easy, and –at least in my case, it would seem—never uneventful!
I am at “Launch and Hold” enroute to the “Mission to Mindanoa-2002”. Of course, nothing should be so easy as to roll up to the DCA ticket counters in a taxi, and, with plenty of time to spare under ideal circumstances, stroll on the flight that has been booked for months and for which all the connecting arrangements are already known by those meeting us, with bags checked all the way to our final destination as we overnight without them in Manila.
Right! This almost happened! Except that there was a small last minute glitch that tripped me up after early arrival on a beautiful spring-like day in DCA.
That is not to say it is anything nearly as disruptive as the events that occurred to derail my last big international multi-venue medical mission from this same check-in counter and the same gate, but it is eerie to walk up with carry-on cleared by security and the seat assignment on the check in boarding pass and to be told the flight has been canceled due to problems quite beyond their control and that I must back up and start again. You must claim your bags at baggage claim and start all over checking them in at the ticket counter where they will try to secure a new flight for you which may even get you in to Los Angeles in time to catch your Manila flight. So, I will tell how carefully I had already got here so early and insisted that I get these bags checked all the way to the final destination and not have them claimed in Manila as they had insisted is the only legal way they can do it. As was the case last time with similar oversize boxes of medical supplies, after a lot of talking and an hour of manipulation, the bags I did not need to see again were checked all the way through to General Santos in Mindanao, and I even produced the email from Alan Mellincor showing his insistence on this fact as they insisted with all the righteousness of national security upon their side that this simply could not be done—and then we wound up doing it! Hooray! They successfully did it at the American Airline check-in desk by doing me the favor of confusing AM and PM on the arrival and departure times.
Well, why not? After all, there is confusion enough in the date it self since we lose all of January 31 tonight by crossing the dateline. But, they pointed out in the first hour of my negotiation with them, that I arrived at 6:15 AM in Manila on Feb. 1, and left at 6:30 AM on Feb. 2 and that is over 24 hours, and that is an intermediate stop no matter what your email printout from this fellow Mellinocor is trying to instruct us to do. How did they finally finesse this “illegal” through tagging of the bag? The helpful AA agents wrote on it “Customer lied about the time of the arrival in Manila.” Whatever it takes to get the bags through and them still employed.
Great! I sat and looked out from the same windows I had been standing next to on September 11 when I had also finessed three bags including a rifle case as well as two big medicine boxes onto the flight, with two of the MAP packs destined for Nepal already in Elizabeth Yellen’s trunk on its way to Boston, where I had hoped to meet her after the Halsted Society meeting and finesse them onto the Lufthansa flight from Logan to FRA and on to DEL. I had got them checked in, all right, since the passenger agent was distracted by an announcement that the supervisor had pulled them all out of their stations to tell them privately. What he had told them is what had just happened in New York to one of the World Trade Center towers. The agent who returned was so dazed, he asked “Now what was it that we were doing?” and I said, “Checking in these two bags”—triumphantly noting that I now had four bags checked in—two at curbside and two from the ticket counter. He waved me off to the window where I am now, where I saw the AA liner coming into the Pentagon, with a later announcement that I should go to baggage claim and pick up my bags—a physical impossibility to manipulate them all as I had discovered by renting a taxi in front of GW and getting it to come down into the parking lot under the Dean’s Office, filling it with all the equipment the Bronco contained on that fateful September 11.
Ditto, today, January 30, 2002. I got a taxi (shiny Mercury Marquis with 141,000 miles on it—which made him all envious when he saw the shiny Bronco II with 198,000 miles—and like its owner—well worn and still functioning well!) and filled it up with all the supplies that I have not left under Harolyn Johnson’s desk in the Dean’s Office. Thereby hangs another tale, which should come to you shortly, but then the rude awakening at the same gate I was trying to board on September 11.
The flight is canceled because of weather in Chicago. “You will have to go to baggage claim and pick up your bags and return to the ticketing counters and arrange a new set of flights to see if you can still get any that will get you into LAX in time to meet your Philippine Airline flights.” Once again, all care and attention to details can be wafted away with the fates of ill winds or ill will.
So, I am now back at the same windows, after having to rent a Smarte Carte, claim the big boxes and go back to the AA counter, where it was not possible to get the suggested United Chicago connection, for the same weather reasons, so they are putting me on the flight to St. Louis, flown by the now stepchild of AA that is the ex-bankrupt TWA. This flight leaves at 2:40—or four hours after I have arrived in the DCA with my Taxi driver from Reedville VA (who was amazed to know that I knew about the Menhaden Industry, his father worked in all his life, that makes Reedville the heaviest tonnage fishing port in the USA for the lubricants of fish oils that will be greasing the aircraft of whatever flight I eventually get on.)
I had a pleasant surprise before my leaving when I found out that Harolyn Johnson, long-term secretary in the Dean’s Office, who arranges all the crediting for the students’ elective experiences with me, who has harbored a life-long wish, as an African-American grandmother in search of “Roots” might be going on the Malawi trip. I immediately arranged that she should go on the same flights with John Sutter and Elizabeth Yellen who will be leaving on the February 15th, as I return on the 17th from the Philippines and takeoff through Amsterdam at 6:00 PM on the 18th to catch up with them.
With this news, I had brought in all the other surgical and medical equipment and supplies I had promised George Poehlman I would try to round up, and parcel them out among me, John, Elizabeth (who will already be carrying those two ill-fated MAP packs that had made the round trip to Boston after being destined for Nepal, the trip now postponed to May after the September 11 abort,) Hayden Boyd, with whom we had dinner last week in preparation for our rendezvous in Malawi—and now—Harolyn! I wrote her a script for Mefloquin for Malaria prophylaxis (it is a high risk rainy season problem now in Malawi) and packed all the boxes I would be taking to both Mindanao (now re-checked in, I hope, to the General Santos City final destination) and to Malawi—with al the others carried up on a cart to her office and crammed under her desk.
Later in the day, Harolyn came to me in tears to announce that she had reached her immediate boss, Scott Schroth, who forbid her going. We talked about it and she said she understood, since the secretary who covers me, the very pleasant and efficient young African American woman Athena McCoy, is leaving this week to go to the Department of Psychiatry to work with Jeff Akman who is now the chairman over there and was associate dean over here which is how he recruited Athena. It is a good move for her—but does negatively impact the Dean’s Office—and most specifically me. She told me this morning that she has come to accommodate this disappointment, since Scott had told her to take the next trip with a little more notice. The next rips are all to India or Nepal, and I have not taken a group to Africa since 1998, and have no immediate plans to repeat such a trip any time soon.
This trip would be ideal for Harolyn, especially since she is in the “Return to Roots” origin mode, and she has the wonderful students, my seasoned veterans of previous trips with me, John and Elizabeth to accompany her. She is always arranging the credit for students and now she can see what it is that she has done on this end to help them on that one. It is a religious and spiritual experience, as well, as anyone who has been to Africa should well know. I said I wasn’t yet convinced that this was the end of her dreams. I would talk with Scott when he came in after his three-day absence.
Harolyn had returned the Mefloquin she had got and I wrote a check for the prescription ($10/pill). She offered to take me to the airport with al the boxes for the Mindanao flight, with the assumption that this might be a time for us to talk. I said I would talk also with Scott—and did, early this morning. I told him about the sensitivity of this opportunity, which really does represent a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Harolyn. He pointed out that they would be one secretary short and that the match was coming up, and that she could not take a month off with no notice. I pointed out that it would be two weeks, with two weeks notice, and that it would mean she returned two weeks before the match to help the unmatched students scramble, and that it was a very significant event in her life that I would like to help facilitate—and that there were several other students and physicians all prepared to do the same to help her along in a guided and supported experience. He said he would reconsider.
As I was making my farewell phone call in my office, Harolyn came over saying she was not allowed to leave to take me to the airport, but that it may be possible for her to go to Malawi after all! So, the lesser of these two favors was not granted, and for that I am very happy, since the priorities are adjusted correctly.
I then dropped the signed real estate contract into the mail that I got last night late upon arrival home, when I saw a package from my lawyer in the mail that Jim had put at my door. I had written a response to the D. G. Liu Contractors, which included another check for the further revised plans, and the key to the house to come back for more measurements. I also wrote further reality limits for the Vander Harts into a letter to Dan Kennedy my lawyer replacing Gary Simpson. I then wrote a response to an email note from Charlie Abernathy, and sent it off as a “Parting Shot” with attachments and itineraries (Jan-C- 8) and dropped off the folder with the background material on the thesis revision proposal at Peter Hotez’s office, having given him the outline “Treating Others” last night.
Having cleared the decks, I took leave by the simple act of finding my Reedville Virginia cab drive r proudly driving his old but well-cared for Mercury Marquis, and running around into the building to let the taxi in to load it up from the Bronco—with the same baggage now twice checked and re-checked in, to get, by some still to be discovered revised means, along with me, across this country where storms somewhere are holding me up in the summery balmy weather of the same Mount Vernon Trail I see from here skirting the airport on which I ran tow days ago in a shirt-sleeve spring day. Then, I will have to get me and my stuff across the biggest ocean on earth, dropping a day, and continuing onward to Mindanao, an island altogether too much in the news lately.
While doing my final packing, and seeing the legal contracts sent by my lawyer, I watched the George Bush State of the Union address—really a series of warnings and marching orders from the Commander in Chief. With an approval rating of over 85% going in to the speech, he certainly did not lower it with the speech itself. It has a charm from its imperfections of oratory, the sincerity of the predicament, and the modesty of the man. This is the right president for this time; but he remembers the approval ratings of his father, who had a plummeting fate alongside the economy’s woes, so he must do something there as well on the domestic side—as I can attest, by noting that given the most grandiose dreams of windfall profits by the Vander Harts, coupled with as ambitious a remodeling project for Derwood as I could envision—the sum of those expenditures does not match the losses of only my TIAA/CREF retirement accounts in the last 14 months, so there will have to be a reality check on the state of each of our own economies as well.
I have had multiple GW medical students coming to me in the past weeks and have placed them in an even spread along the number of trips that will be going. Ravi had expressed concern for the trip to Dharamsala in April, and with only a few signed up, I set about recruiting. I talked with a GW med student who is a patent attorney named Marita Mike, and signed her up after what she called a “very inspiring” motivation. Huda Ayas from the “International Medicine Office” is always saying she would like to make a trip of mine, but already does the minor administrative kind; for example, she is currently in India doing some kind of exchange memorandum of understanding. But none of this is clinical, and although she has no clinical skills or background, I suggested she take the Dharamsala trip—since she would have no sensitivity to the calendar, as the medical students do who cannot leave except in the summer between freshman and sophomore years (when they are able to do the least, and are the most impressionable) and a senior elective period.
As I had gone to York PA and there contacted the residents, who also have no need of special consideration on the calendar, I met a German who is a senior surgical resident, named Wolfgang Stehr, and recruited him, with an email this morning saying he had cleared the hurdles at the hospital. I sent each of these recruits the information from the April trip to Dharamsala, which should have been available on the Web through the On-Line Journal. When I tried to access this trip—like all the others, put together with enormous effort in a complete narrative report to be available for just this purpose in informing the applicants what to expect---and then, the web site fails to deliver after all the input has been invested several times. I keep writing notes to the web guru who has assured me he would have it updated and fixed by last month, but not only is it not updated, it has lost all the access to the chapters listed which are simply reported as “Not Found” when they are double clicked. So, in response to the promise of information on the “Welcome to the World of Wonders” introduction to the opportunities and schedules of the medical missions of 2002, the applicants that draw a blank either withdraw, or write a note complaining. When they complain, I retrieve the discs from home and send them a note attaching the narratives to help them prepare. The web Home Page, therefore, was meant as a laborsaving device, which has now taken twice as much work and still not delivered the end product.
I had a series of students come to see me from GW whom I have signed into the Spiti trip in June. These included a bouncy Air Force freshman medical student named Kate Sullivan. Yesterday I consulted twice with a pair of students named Matt and Clara, who seemed skilled in net searches for support. They found a New York based organization called the Explorer’s Fund which can allocate up to two dozen grants of about $1500 each for students for just this purpose to bring back data, or a report or some research interest—so we generated one from the Spiti Valley in the unusual incidence I had remarked on both GERD and Gastric Cancer. They had also found a few other sources of support, and I will see if we can use their surfing to help a few others. I am chagrined to see, however, that a number of students are expecting me to go out and fundraise for them, and have expected that I can entertain a sting of email responses on a near daily basis –with literally hundreds of other students out there hoping for the same. I told a group recently at GW, that perhaps they might pool their resources and try for a group fund raising with a program in which I would participate, but not to the exclusive benefit of one individual. One eager beaver even has his own web site for the purpose of fund raising for the trip and keeps asking me to respond to it—although I have not seen it as yet.
Sammy Gorman had been on the Ladakh trip last summer, and now will get credit from her osteopathic school if she had a letter from a creditable source—namely me. So, I wrote such a letter and she will be spending the whole summer out there, going through Ladakh again and then on to Lingshed and still staying behind with the local hospital to learn a bit more on the inpatient side—a total of 2 months in addition to what she already had in two trips to India last year, of which her parents must be sponsoring her well. She is a fun person to have on the trip, and very responsive to special teaching. She is also a “rock artist” and painted me a special flat rock I had retrieved from the summit of the peak overlooking Tso Morari, which is now a lakescape I have on my desk. She would like to climb Stok Kangri with me which is an exercise I will do either in the “gap” between the Ladakh trip and the Lingshed three weeks (if I can get others who are already acclimatized to get up that high that soon) or it will follow the excursion into Lingshed, which should have them up at altitude for three weeks and well-broken in from the trek. If the latter, I may fill in the “gap” nearby Lei with a bit more ambitious white water running of the Indus River along a good stretch of it. This would be a great holiday like running the Colorado—in the ancient river with the cradle of civilization along its banks.
I packed up from my seat by the window side where I can also scavenge the electricity from the outlet here to feed this machine, when I strolled over to a remarkably empty gate. I asked if I could get a better sweat selection, since they were all field as middle seats despite my earlier requests. ”Oh, there you are! We have been looking for you! You will have to go back to baggage claim and reclaim your bag and go again to check in to see if you can get re-booked and re-routed on another series of flights. This one has been canceled because of weather in Chicago.” Poof! There went all my cleverness about getting the bags booked all the way to General Santos through a lot of extra effort. I had come through the security screen rather well, since I was not asked three times to take off my shoes as I had been in Michigan on takeoff from my MERC visiting professor gig there just before my birthday. I did not even set off the alarms with about three quarters in my pocket and a couple of ballpoints in my shirt. So, I got through and returned quickly enough to find my still unclaimed Smarte Carte and elevatored back to baggage claim and went up again to the American Airlines check-in. I went through the same drill with a new young woman who seemed much less bothered about going by the book.
I pulled off the bag claim tickets and showed her that the bags were booked straight through to General Santos City, so all I needed to do now is get me somehow to LAX in time to catch the Philippine Airways flight. “OK,” she said. So, I ran through the drill again, and actually got it accomplished the second time in a row. “While I am here,” I added, “How about better seat assignments than the middle seats I have all along the way.”
One was possible, the other was not—so, like the choice with Harolyn about coming to the airport or going to Malawi, I took the bigger one.
The same machine I had just come through without any problem was acting up when I returned. It was going off for any reason, and the men in line ahead of me were being asked to take of their shoes, belts, etc. bringing to a shutdown any people going through the line I was in. Since it was the shorter line when I got to it, I was reluctant to jump ship until I saw that the longer line had gone through several times faster at another machine. So what make these security devices act as though they are pre-menstrual? The answer is simple: there are any number of ways to shout down and bugger up a hypersensitive security system (remember the football fan who ran back to pick up his camera and shut down Atlanta’s airport for half a day?) and very few by which the operation runs smoothly, especially when there is a zero-tolerance for error. So, the whole air transport system is on a hair trigger to do what it does most spectacularly—self-destruct.
I did a successful end run around the busted machine as each of the guys standing in that queue, were being hand searched thoroughly. As I boarded the plane, they announced that for thirty minutes after they had reached a cruising altitude, the seat belt sign would be still on, and that may be any time for the majority of most flights if this is not just a regulation that impacts more on the victim than on the perpetrators.
BACK IN MOTION:
I GET DIVERTED THROUGH RAINY ST LOUIS
AROUND STORMY CHICAGO
TO GET TO LOS ANGELES LATER—
BUT STILL A FIGHTING CHANCE TO CATCH MY PAL FLIGHT
TO MANILA
I was the only single male traveling alone not randomly selected to be re-searched at the gate. The reasons for that, I am sure, is that I am not making a single flight segment, but have a complex itinerary ahead, not a likely scenario for a terrorist. After we took off an hour and a half later than my original flight would have, there was a PA announcement that the seat belt sign would remain on for thirty minutes after we reach cruising altitude. This seems to be unique to Washington DC and was not similarly said as we took off from St Louis. I was startled to see that curbside check-in has resumed since the embargo on this service after September 11, but of course it does not apply to international travelers, or anyone with the kind of “equipment” I was packing last time—like a rifle case.