Last week, I took a trip to visit my mom in California.
She had taken a bad fall and needed two emergency surgeries, one for her left wrist, one for her left shoulder.
When I landed, my future daughter-in-law picked me up at the airport.
As soon as I got in the car, she looked at me and asked,
“Is that all the luggage you brought? You sure travel light.”
The moment she asked that, horror hit me like catching my toddler coloring on the white couch with permanent markers: I had left my medical equipment in the airplane’s overhead bin.
Not ideal.
I sprinted back toward the gate like Carl Lewis chasing an Olympic gold.
I surprised myself. I didn’t know I could run that fast. If someone had handed me a baton, I probably could have anchored the 400M relay team.
By God’s grace they found it and handed it back to me. I tried not to hug the gate agent, but I was close.
Without my daughter-in-law’s question, I probably would have realized the device was missing when the plane was somewhere over Utah.
When I got to my mom’s house, things were a little more serious than expected.
She needed help with everything: wobbly, confused, in constant pain, waking up every hour. Hallucinations even joined the party.
No one can sustain that kind of routine for long without losing a little sanity… especially the caregiver.
A closer look at her bedtime medications revealed the culprit: both listed insomnia and hallucinations as side effects.
Which is interesting…
because hallucinating is rarely listed under “quality of life improvements.”
Especially when the hallucination involves seeing your great-grandchild sitting on the ceiling fan.
Once we stopped the medications and quadrupled her laser treatments, things changed quickly.
Her pain went away.
She started sleeping through the night.
And the version of my mom who was seeing imaginary things in the room quietly disappeared.
In other words, my mom started becoming normal again.
We even got out of the house a few times.
At that stage of recovery, that is a major win.
Now there was one more mission I needed to accomplish while I was in California.
Food.
When you move away from a place you love, you learn something important:
You don’t just lose proximity to people… you lose proximity to your favorite restaurants.
And my family made sure I recovered from that loss as well.
Over the next few days, we revisited a few of my old favorites that simply do not exist in Florida.
Let’s just say my California dining “rehabilitation program” was very successful.
Remarkable progress in a very short period of time.
The final moment of the trip happened while boarding the plane home.
As I walked down the ramp toward the aircraft, I noticed a toy dinosaur sitting on the ground.
Clearly there was a potential in-flight crisis developing somewhere.
So, I picked it up.
As I walked down the aisle toward my seat, I asked each parent with small children,
“Does this happen to be your son’s dinosaur?”
After two or three rejections, one mom suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree.
“There it is!”
She turned to the rest of her family like they had just recovered a lost national treasure.
Little Junior grabbed that dinosaur like Martin Short clutching his beloved Steffen in the movie Clifford.
Crisis officially averted.
When I sat down and started thinking about the week, I realized four bullets were dodged:
I almost lost a very costly and valuable piece of medical equipment.
My mom almost lost her sanity & recovery because of hallucinating meds.
I almost lost access to some of my favorite California meals for another year.
And Junior almost lost his beloved T-Rex.
Life has a funny way of reminding us that things slip away sometimes.
Health slips away.
Strength slips away.
Mobility slips away.
Routines slip away.
Relationships slip away.
Sometimes it happens dramatically.
Other times it happens quietly.
A fall.
A setback.
A relocation.
A medication side effect.
An injury that does not quite heal.
And the difference between getting something back or losing it long-term often comes down to how quickly you respond.
On a physical level, that is something I remind patients of often.
When something changes in your body: pain, weakness, balance issues, nerve symptoms, it is a signal.
Something is off.
Something is out of balance.
And the sooner you address it, the better the body tends to respond.
Early intervention often means:
Faster return to quality of life.
Less expense.
Better outcomes.
Ignore the signal long enough, and sometimes the opportunity to recover fully slips away.
On my last morning in California, my son drove me to the airport.
As we headed down the road, the sun was rising over the San Bernardino mountains.
It is a view I often saw during morning walks when I lived there.
It felt like the perfect way to end the trip.
Sometimes the hardest weeks give you greater appreciation for the little things in life: the sun always rises, dinosaurs get reunited, medical devices return, and somehow, we get another opportunity to be grateful for the things that matter.
Have a terrific Tuesday!
Dr. Derek “Traveling Light (but not that light)” Taylor
