Merely Inconvenienced

Winter break...Peace, quiet, calm reflection, and a healthy dose of stress.

This particular installment of life through the Prosthetic and Orthotic program at Georgia Tech should include a scratch-and-sniff sticker that smells like a roaring wood fire. Although it's one day until this article's due date, I have been mentally formulating this Pulitzer Prize winner for weeks, with the actual typing of it saved until the very end. Winter break finds me home in Idaho for the first time in months. It has been a wonderfully quiet break, and the only time I've even thought about last semester's lectures was when the legless and armless characters from our new Nintendo Wii gaming system flash on the screen--a system that my grandparents stood in line for hours to obtain.

The peace and quiet here has spoiled me, and as I reflect on some of the things that have happened to me over this winter break, I am surprised by my edgy reactions when faced with unexpected events. My flight home went smoothly until I flew into the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (Sea-Tac) on the coattails of the December windstorms that knocked out power for thousands of homes and, unfortunately, the airport control tower. Only a few hours from home, I watched helplessly as flight after flight was cancelled, leaving me and hundreds of other passengers stranded in Seattle. While I received an airline voucher for a hotel room and a Hertz Ford Mustang, the few hotels that still had power were filled. So I spent the night in a hospital parking lot huddled in the passenger seat of the Mustang, wrapped in a borrowed blanket from the emergency room. My sense of humor was growing thin when the temperature within the car dropped to near freezing. The following morning I was one of the fortunate passengers to squeeze onto the roster of an Idaho-bound plane.

As my return date to school has approached, so too has the bill for Tech's tuition. The stress of juggling the logistics of work and classes in graduate school has been building. The final straw was when my hair-dresser mixed her colors and dyed my hair a sassy red with tame brown streaks when I had actually requested the reverse. I drove home in shock, reminding myself that the only man I'm trying to impress in Georgia is color-blind, and the sunny northern skies quickly turned ominous gray and enormous slushy snowflakes fell fast and hard. By the time I reached my parent's mountain home, we were in the midst of a blizzard and without electric power.

Mom lit every candle in the house, and Dad stomped through the snow practicing his Paul Bunyan moves on the firewood, which is stacked next to the house for times such as these. I was the designated Girl Scout, starting the fire in the wood stove. Now, as the mesmerizing orange flames lick snow off the surface of the firewood, the silence of electronics gone comatose surrounds me.

The fire roars as I type this article under the faint glow of my quickly waning battery-powered laptop. My thoughts go to my friends in Basra who have sporadic electricity for only three hours a day. I met these Iraqi amputees and technicians when I traveled with a team from Physicians for Peace to Amman Jordan last summer. We utilized the amputees as patient models to teach technicians how to fabricate, fit, and modify limbs. A dear friend, an Iraqi colonel who had adopted me as his American "daughter," accompanied me to the airport in the early morning hours to ensure my safe departure. I cried while the plane taxied down the runway, knowing that I was flying west to a land of mere inconvenience, and he was flying east to a war zone.

War zones, natural disasters, and misfortune are all problems that seldom discriminate between victims. This night I rely on candlelight and a woodstove for heat, but there were thousands in Seattle who lived without power for days prior to Christmas, and many more in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi who suffered greatly after Hurricane Katrina. I am once again reminded of the difference between an "inconvenience" and a "problem." It reminds me never to allow mere inconvenience to stand in the way of being a solution to a real problem. In this next year, please consider becoming involved in aid work, solving true problems abroad and here at home.

Chelan Pedrow is a graduate student in the MSPO Program at the School of Applied Physiology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. She will be sharing her experiences through articles in The O&P EDGE throughout her two-year program, internship, certification, and as she begins her professional career.

Merely Inconvenienced

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Hi-Tech Military Rehab Center Opens

Researchers to Test Osseointegration Infection-Reducing Product

Researchers to Test Osseointegration Infection-Reducing Product

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