Tender Mercies #2, The Right Seatmate

Sarah is fascinated with manga, anime and other Asian type comics.  She has saved 1000’s of these cute family comic images on her Pinterest board.  One of her most prized possessions is a DVD set of Studio Ghibli movies (Japanese animation film studio based in Koganei, Tokyo, Japan. The studio is best known for its anime feature films).  She also loves cheesy Asian romances and is interested in Korean pop music.  She is captivated by many different countries, and has a driving interest in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean cultures. 

A few comic and Studio Ghibli images Sarah likes:

In August she and I spent a week at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, AZ.  She saw a neurologist, Dr. Brent Goodman, who specializes in POTS and had many tests done to try to get to the bottom of what’s causing her POTS.

She was very weak physically and had been doing IV therapy three times a week to increase blood volume.  The days she spent several hours laid back in a zero G chair, running two bags of saline into her blood stream, totally wiped her out.  Just being in a chair for that long was a big challenge.  She spent most of the rest of the day sleeping.

The day after getting IV fluids were usually good days for her.  Her blood pressure and heart rate would be in normal ranges instead of the usual high heart rate and very low blood pressure.  Apparently things work much better when getting enough blood to your heart.

A good day meant being able to be out in the living room in a chair for a couple hours at a time.  Energy to write stories on her tablet and sometimes energy to draw while sitting.  Better stability for walking down the hall to her room or standing up in the kitchen for a few minutes to grab food.

We had been avoiding air travel for any trips she had to take in 2019 because airline regulations require you to be able to sit up, and I could not guarantee she would be able to sit up for the time it would take for the flight.
 
Traveling by car she had the option to lay her seat all the way back or lay down in the back seat when necessary.  We could also take things as slow as we needed to and break it up if we needed to.

We had a family reunion in Washington right before her appointments at the MAYO.  Trying to work out the logistics for getting to Arizona from there, we decided we were going to have to fly.  We signed up for wheelchairs to get her through the airports.

I was really concerned about how the flights were going to go.  The direct flight from Seattle to Phoenix was about 2 hours 45 minutes.  Sitting up for that long, on top of the energy it would take getting to and from the flights, even in a wheelchair, was a big concern.

Things worked well with getting through the airport to the gate in a wheelchair.  That left her tired.  On the plane, we were on the outside two seats of a three-seat section.  Sarah was in the middle.  On the inside seat, sat a friendly, bubbly college student from China who was studying in Arizona.  She and Sarah immediately hit it off.  They had many similar interests. 

She had just come back from a vacation to Japan and had lots of pictures from the trip that she showed.  She had saved her pennies and bought kimonos at a couple of locations and had pictures of herself in the traditional dress at several sites.

Sarah’s eye’s lit up as she interacted with this new friend.  She would literally clap her hands as they chatted animatedly.  At one point, Sarah asked her if she could draw her a picture.  (She loves drawing pictures for people).

The girl asked if Sarah could draw a picture of her with her cat.  She had a cat at college that she loved and told lots of funny stories about.  She showed Sarah pictures of her cat.

She was pleased with the picture Sarah had drawn, and told Sarah she had been working on a kind of drawing as well.  Then she drew her a picture.

I could not have dreamed up a more perfect or distracting seat mate for Sarah for that 2 hours and 45 minutes of sitting.  I felt overwhelmed with gratitude for that tender mercy!  What could have been a great ordeal, had proved to be an amazing gift instead.  It also reminded me of just how well Heavenly Father knows Sarah and loves her!