West Palm Beach Healed Me
I successfully pooped while traveling and changed my return flight the morning-of.
I went to a friend’s wedding in Florida last weekend and it was my first time on a plane since March 2019. I’m not the most chill traveler under normal circumstances mostly because I have a rich imagination but also I have the constipated kind of IBS where I fully stop pooping when I travel and this always adds a sweet layer of agitation. This story probably will be boring for anyone who does not have travel anxiety so if that’s you, congrats and honestly you can skip this. (More illustrations are towards the bottom😇)
How I prepare for travel:
No groceries the week leading up to the trip
Chug Metamucil 2x/day in hopes to retrain my gut
Talk myself out of reinventing my wardrobe
Continuously double check my itinerary to confirm that the date/time/route is correct
My coping mechanism is the packing list. I write it over and over again in multiple formats: phone notes, morning pages, loose printer paper, and sticky notes. This time around I used a different color pen to check off my list and make notes of things that still had to be packed morning-of. That was a nice touch.
I need to be at the airport two hours before my flight and generally like to stop in the stairwell of my apartment at least once to unzip my bag and quickly check to make sure I packed things like underwear, shoes, my wallet or my phone. I do one more frantic stop, drop and unzip in the middle of the sidewalk. At this point I’m sweating profusely. I usually take a car to the airport because I can no longer trust myself to stay cool while navigating the subway. Once I spent ~15 min running back and forth between the uptown and downtown ACE trains because I didn’t realize either one could get me to JFK. I mean, a full mess. And of course airport security is a nightmare. Right before it’s my turn to scan my boarding pass, I take out my ID which I’m surprised to find in my wallet each time; shocked that it didn’t somehow escape out of its zipped case, and I let it hang loose in my pocket until I’m up. Reckless! Once I’m through and enter the x-ray pipeline I black out and then congratulate myself when my stuff gets back to me on the other side. Holding up the line to get my shoes on is mortifying so I—with armfuls of my loose belongings—hobble to the nearest bench in panic, hoping for the best that I don’t drop anything along the way.
There was a lot going on in there: I packed six extra masks in my carry on, you know, just in case the one I was wearing flew off my face and another broke or another slipped out of my bag, a handful of Brazil nuts (TikTok taught me they help with constipation), a USB cord and a dongle, a travel size face lotion and cream (small reminder here this was just a three hour flight) and I also brought five full-coverage, overnight, winged pads. I’m on birth control and my period isn’t due for another two weeks. Plus my daughter, my iPad.
I laid out a strict time schedule for my boyfriend the night before:
“Our flight is at 8:30am but it starts boarding at 7:55am. We need to be at the airport at least an hour ahead of boarding time so 6:55am which means we need to leave the apartment by 6am at the very latest. I will be waking up at 4:30am.” I apparently needed an hour and a half to brush my teeth and put on leggings.
At 4:30 I was ready. Adrenaline coursing through body. I was born to do this. And this time it really paid off to get to the airport early…I booked my boyfriend’s flight under his NICKNAME. To be fair, this nickname functions more like a legal name at this point. Everyone calls him this. We’ve been together for over a year (and in pandemic years that’s more like two) and I usually forget his legal name even exists. We check in and we are laughed at. His ID and his ticket do not match. His ticket is not valid. My legs have gone numb and he cannot board the flight.
Everything ended up being totally fine. They updated his name, printed him a new boarding pass and we still had an hour to kill. THIS IS WHY.
I then naturally begin to pick the Delta scab. The moment I board the plane and settle into my seat I decide to admire the new tickets with the corrected name and realize his itinerary had been wiped from my Delta app. Fully gone. HOW IS HE GOING TO GET BACK HOME. As our flight is beginning to take off I decide that the airline has erased all record of this ticket and that time is of the essence. This cannot wait. I open up the Delta chat and just as I send my “Hi there, my confirmation number is…” the answer flashes before me. I remember the person helping us muttering something to herself about a number being different. THE CONFIRMATION NUMBER. “Yoni, give me your ticket I figured it out.” I plugged the numbers in online with his legal name and yep. There it was. The return flight. I looked over at my boyfriend; eyes wide, joyful, maniacal. “We’re in. I am TRAVEL AGENT.”
And just when I thought I couldn’t feel any lighter: I took some sips of coffee and almost immediately felt the joyful cramping of my intestines. I had to poop??? Before leaving for a trip I get really intense with my Metamucil consumption to up my chances of pooping on vacation. To me, pooping on a plane is a gift. And you’ve gotta take it when you can. Because if that poop is not let out in a timely manner it somehow will disappear. Where do they go.
My vacation Metamucil routine that keeps the bile ball rolling:
The poop cycle was more important this time than on other trips because the dress I was wearing to the wedding was already pushing the limits as far as me fitting into it. I hadn’t exercised in earnest in three months and I had just come off a fruit roll-up bender. I wanted to feel mobile and also eat that good wedding food. Going too long without pooping would be pretty miserable.
I pooped 2.5/4 days in West Palm Beach. True miracle.
The return flight is always easier for me. I’ve made it through the trip with everything I have and all I have to do is put it back in a bag. If I forget something, it’s generally replaceable. I will think I left my phone behind a few times when I’m just sitting on it, but otherwise it’s pretty breezy. And this time I was running high on my functioning bowel and promotion to travel agent–and! there was a delicious farewell breakfast buffet:
I was feeling good.
Which is the only way I can explain what I did just hours before I was headed to the airport for my return flight: I changed our itinerary. Midway through my second helping of sausages and heaven grits, I starting switching our flight to a later one–direct and landing earlier than the original. There were just two seats left and I was gonna get them. I got on a call with Delta and also started a support chat because I’m overkill. After 10 minutes on the phone + chat I realized how much of a mistake I’d made. Don’t ever do two modes of customer service at once. It was a little touch and go and I was left with tickets that “could not be validated” when I tried to check in online—which is when I got on my third Delta chat that weekend. I was moving too fast for the system. We got on the flight.
I continued to test my limits that afternoon with a long walk, returning to our hotel just twenty minutes before we wanted to leave for the airport and then later–perhaps inspired by this life on the edge living–I watched Black Widow on the flight home and it catapulted me into a Marvel movie marathon. Notes on that to come.
West Palm Beach changed me.
I can never sleep the night before a flight. Ok, my flight is at 8, so I need to get to the airport by 6, so I need to leave the house at 5, so I need to wake up at 4. Then I finish packing at 2am and lay awake for two hours, certain I'm going to sleep through my alarm and miss my flight (even though that has never happened to me). It's awesome