If I’m not mistaken, my last post, about travelling with my VNS, ended with something about how I was starting to get anxious about the trip back to Toronto. At the time I wrote it, I was mostly joking. It turned out, however, that those simple words were enough to jinx the homeward voyage. Not that I believe in the extreme power of my thoughts or anything.
Even my exceptional pessimism couldn’t have predicted what was to come: a late-February snowstorm, on Canada’s West Coast, of all places.
There must be some sort of established equation for airport readiness—5 cm of snow in Vancouver=10 cm of snow in Toronto, etc. When the accumulated amount of Vancouver snow is forecasted to be 10 cm or more, as it was that Friday, all hell breaks loose. Markedly increasing my anxiety when I found out that there was the BC equivalent of a blizzard coming on the day of our planned flight was the fact that we’d bought two separate tickets instead of one (or four, I guess, since there are two of us). This is because almost at the last minute, we’d decided to fly home from a different city than originally planned, and it ended up being significantly less expensive to buy the extra flight segment outright rather than rebook the tickets that we already had. What would happen, my kilometres-a-minute brain asked, if we didn’t make our connection? The airline, after all, wasn’t responsible for it; it was up to us to get from Victoria to Vancouver in time for the Vancouver–Toronto leg of our journey.
Luckily for us, Air Canada anticipated that there’d be a mess due to the forecasted snow and was allowing people flying from Victoria and Vancouver to rebook at no cost. We switched both tickets to leave two days later, when the snow was predicted to be completely gone, and in the end, we got home without any major problems.
I’m very slowly learning that there are silver linings to almost every situation that initially feels intolerably anxiety-provoking. In this case, the plus was a big one: because of the forced change, we got to spend an extra few days with my family, and once we’d altered our travel plans, I was able to relax enough to enjoy this bonus time—for me, whose default state in recent months has been “nervous wreck,” this was perhaps the biggest win of all.
De Morbo Sacro: Life and/with Epilepsy 