Aviation Stories-1: Dying To Fly

By Chriselda Barretto

Ellen sat in the cold waiting room looking at the clock on the wall. She was stressed, which wasn't normal for her. She had been through quite a few near death situations before where she always maintained her calm. So why today? Why was she feeling so shaky, so raw? – An Excerpt.

Follow the life of Ellen Sanders, a senior flight attendant. Experience her joys, her pain, her sorrow! Relive the chilling, eye-opening truth Ellen discovers about her illness!

This is the first in a series of aviation stories. Based on a true story, the author wants to help expose the taboo and often unglamorous, but real side of aviation. She has started the SHIFT movement – 'Sharing Helpful Information For Tomorrow', through various social media channels to help gather information for this series. She strives to voice the aviation community's concerns and experiences.

Look out for the next aviation story soon!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chriselda Barretto
• Release date: Jan 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9789463881036

Chriselda Barretto

Chriselda was born in Bombay, India bringing in the New Year, on 2nd January. She moved to Belgium in 1996 where she currently resides with her family. She has mixed roots, namely Anglo-Indian and Goan-Portuguese influenced. Having travelled the world extensively, as an Inflight Safety Training Instructor, she has worked in the Aviation industry for over two decades. Always with a touch of artistic creativity along with being a professional modern jazz dancer, she also loves music and is passionate about writing! She loves writing poetry, stories and quotes. Her aim is to bring poetry back to its glory and has published her first narrative poetry story series 'The Creep', in a thriller genre! Other fiction genres she is currently working on are romance, fantasy and she promises to surprise with a few more. So stay tuned! She is presently writing more poems and a follow up to The Creep series, and has some more titles that she has already begun work on.  

Book preview

Chapter 1

Our Protagonist - Ellen Sanders

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Ellen sat in the cold waiting room looking at the clock on the wall. She was stressed which wasn’t normal for her. She had been through quite a few near-death situations before where she always maintained her calm. So why today? Why was she feeling so shaky, so raw? Maybe the anticipation of surgery, something new, something she had never been through before was getting to her. She considered herself to be this strong, confident Senior Attendant, a trait that always came forth whenever she put her uniform on before a flight. Her uniform seemed to be more of an armour protecting her from any adversity; it made her feel invincible! But today she didn’t have that; she was bare, unprotected, weak, maybe that was why she felt so unconfident, so meek!

Seated outside the doctor’s office, waiting patiently for her turn wasn’t entirely her thing. She started fiddling with her phone, going through Facebook, anything really to get herself to calm down. She thought back to the first time when she had scheduled an appointment to meet with Dr. Claeys. Since a couple of months now, she was always so fatigued but being a flight attendant for so many years, I guess you could say that her body was used to it. This kind of fatigue was probably normal, considering the changing work shifts, sometimes early morning while other times all through the night! That and trying to be perfect at everything she did was adding to that fatigue too! But it wasn’t just the fatigue. Of late she had started feeling numbness in her hands and feet, sometimes accompanied by a prickly needle-like sensation. It was getting worse on her hands now, because sometimes the tips of her fingers would go cold and numb too, and no matter how she tried to move her hand to get back some of the circulation, it wouldn’t help.

After a lot of hesitation and denial that it could be something more than just bad circulation, she decided to consult a specialist to try and help her figure out what could be causing her this discomfort. She needed reassurance that this was temporary and that he could make it all go away. She hated feeling 'handicapped' because she was too much of a hard-working professional to let a meagre sickness get in the way of her job!

Dr. Claeys, a friendly doctor, somewhere in his early fifties, gladly welcomed her into his office. Ellen had been asked to fill out a form before the consultation, which contained pretty standard questions about age, prior medical history, and reasons for the check-up. As she stepped into his office, she noticed her filled-out form in front of him on the desk.

She took a seat as asked by Dr. Claeys while he studied her form. Once he had finished reading, he asked her to explain her symptoms, while he noted it down onto his writing pad. Ellen mentioned how her hands seemed to get numb consistently, especially the tips of her fingers. She added how she sensed that she was losing the strength of her right palm. Though both of her hands got numb, she felt that her right hand was worse than her left. Being right-handed meant that it was all the more uncomfortable to be able to work, write or carry things with it.  She tried showing him how she couldn’t even make a strong, closed fist in front of him. She explained that it felt like her muscles had weakened!

Something else which worried her was that she was always fatigued and sometimes suffered from severe muscle pain. He kept noting things down; asking about when these symptoms had all began. Ellen hesitated because she knew it had been going on for a while now, but she kept ignoring it, like with many other things in her life. She was used to being strong, more like HAD to be strong, to be able to always portray this confident personality that everyone believed her to be. Being an optimist, she believed in positivity, and she thought things like pain or fatigue couldn’t get her down. She wouldn’t let something so trivial get to her!

After giving the doctor as much information as she could, he explained that he would be conducting a few tests on her hand to confirm what he already had diagnosed from her answers. He took her palm in his hands and pressed firmly around her wrist and waited for a couple of seconds. Ellen was surprised because she felt her palm go hot and then cold and then a shooting pain ran all through her fingers. It was like as if she didn’t feel her palm anymore and it hurt badly. She wanted him to stop. He did eventually, which seemed like hours! He began writing something more down on his pad. After what seemed like forever he looked up at her, took his glasses off and started speaking to her, Ellen, you are suffering from what we call Carpel Tunnel Syndrome. Gosh that scared her! It sounded pretty serious!

He went on to explain what that meant. He told her that it was a painful condition of the hand and fingers caused by the compression of a major nerve, where it passes over the carpal bones through a passage at the front of the wrist. He said that sometimes it could be caused by frequent, repetitive movements of the hand or in some cases by fluid retention.

What he said made a bit of sense, but it was a lot to take in. He also said that the only way to get rid of it would be by having a small open surgery done on the hand. They would make an incision at the base of the palm. This incision would allow him to see the transverse carpal ligament. The ligament would then be cut, to create more space, for better circulation, and they would end by stitching up the incised area. The gap where the ligament was cut would be left alone and would eventually fill up with scar tissue. There would be minimal scarring to the area, if not indistinguishable.

Ellen asked if something as drastic as surgery could be avoided and if maybe regular exercise would not help to relieve the condition. Dr. Claeys was a well-known and experienced doctor in his line of work. He had come highly recommended by Ellen’s doctor, so his word was The Bible! Dr. Claeys told Ellen that if she was lucky, the surgery would relieve all of her symptoms but in some rare cases, the symptoms could resurface after a couple of years where then a second surgery might become necessary. He advised her that she might also have to consider having the operation done for her other hand as well, but at a later date once the first hand had properly healed!

Ellen felt vulnerable; maybe she wasn’t all that invincible as she had so firmly believed all these years. She nodded still trying to absorb what the specialist had just told her. Greeting him goodbye she stepped out of his office to set up an appointment for the surgery.

The thought of having to go on sick leave felt horrible; it made her feel uncomfortable. Her ultra-professional mind pushed through, managing to disintegrate the common sense that she had so finely trusted all through her life. She knew she didn’t have a choice here; this was her throw of the dice, and she would have to work through it!

Chapter 2

A Hidden Past

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1-  The Pre-Flight Prep

Ellen looked at her face, which was lightly covered with make-up that she had just applied. Her grooming had to be impeccable; it was an integral part of a stewardess's