Leaving Japan wasn't hard. I was sad when I said goodbye, shed some tears but mostly felt anxious to get on that big ass plane for the 9 1/2 hour trek across the Pacific and return to 'normal' life.
I've ranted about my fear of flying so I won't go off on another tangent however I will say there is no such thing as a good flight, at least for me. There is either: unbearable, horrendous, I almost died, fuck this I am never doing this again ever or just okay. My friend Izzy was my flying partner, who is just as scared of flying as me, if not even more. She has gone to fear of flying therapy and takes strong pills to help her relax. I take anxiety pills when I fly but after seeing what Izzy's pills do to her I realize I am taking the wrong ones. Hers work mine kinda work.
When we left Japan swine flu was wreaking havoc on the already paranoid and overly cautious island. So when Izzy asked one of the flight attendants for something for her upset stomach, which was causing her to vomit, I knew by looking at the flight attendants face that Izzy had just unintentionally started a swine flu hysteria on our flight. It didn't help that an hour before this I asked for some type of headache relief. The fact of the matter was that the night before we all stayed up late drinking beer in the park. We barely slept so of course we were a tad bit hangover, some more than others.
Combine this with the fear of flying, eating shitty food in the airport, taking pills to calm your nerves, breathing recycled crappy air that makes your already dehydrated ass even more dehydrated and with the anxiety of returning home after being gone so long=one headache and one upset stomach. I tried explaining this to three or four flight attendants that came to check on us but you could tell none of them believed me and thought we both had swine flu.
I told Izzy to let me do the talking from here on out and if they asked, she was feeling better. We were not going to tell them how our finals were cancelled because of swine flu. I knew we didn't have it because no one in our city had been infected. I told the attendants this but it didn't help that Izzy had made at least a dozen trips to the bathroom at this point but I told them she only puked one of those times. Then one of them came over and told us that if Izzy wasn't feeling better by the end of the flight, he would have to contact the San Francisco airport and let them know we might be infected and that he had already notified the captain. Quarantine seemed inevitable.
In Japan they were quarantining people for 10 days and once I thought about this I started to freak out. I told Izzy she needed to just go to sleep and act like she feels better any time an attendant approached us. I had been in Japan for four months, she had been there for nine, there was no way in hell we were going to make it all the way home and then be stuck in San Fran in quarantine for 10 days.
For the rest of the flight, the attendants were extra careful and made sure they had no contact with us when serving us our crap food and drinks. At one point I asked one of them for a pen to fill out my customs sheet and when I was done I got up to return it to her. She looked horrified that I had even left my seat and refused to take the pen back saying I could keep it as a souvenir. This would have been a nice gesture but the pen was from a Hyatt hotel not from United Airlines so why the hell would I want a pen from Hyatt? I told her I didn't want it but she just insisted I take, refusing to take it back.
As we made our descent into San Francisco I envisioned health workers in hazmat suits awaiting Izzy and I. I had already planned an escape route and Izzy informed me she would not be joining me. As they came through the cabin for the last time to collect remaining trash several of them stopped by to ask how we were doing. I cut Izzy off and replied that we were doing great and that we just get a little nervous when we fly. They seemed to buy it because Izzy and I were scott free once we exited the aircraft. It was a tortuous flight as always but made especially worse by the stupid swine flu hysteria. I was forced to sit there the whole flight while Izzy was either puking or sleeping, thinking of different escape plans and various ways to convince them that we weren't infected with the flu. I guess one good thing came out of it though, I barely thought about crashing into the ocean or blowing up mid-air. I was too worried about the pigs.
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