Last weekend, I attended LUNGevity's National HOPE Summit that is held every year in Washington, DC. If you have lung cancer, consider attending a HOPE Summit. You will leave so uplifted and so hopeful! There is much happening in the lung cancer research field right now. These are exciting times!
But, the purpose of this post is actually to tell a story about a mishap that could have caused tempers to flair but instead found everyone laughing and having a great time.
LUNGevity treats its participants like royalty. On Saturday night, we took buses to the Old Angler's Inn. A number of us loaded up onto Bus #5 (the last bus). I noticed right away that our bus driver had Google map directions that he was trying to read as he was driving. I didn't say anything to anyone else about it until we had been on the road for quite some time and the driver started to make a turn, stopped pretty much in the middle of the intersection for a long while, and then continued forward back onto the freeway. DC traffic is pretty wild ... his driving was making it worse!! Anyway, I mentioned to the person I was sitting with that the driver was clueless as to where we were going.
It wasn't long before that fact filtered through the bus and soon we had several backseat drivers telling the actual driver where to turn next. By now, we had been on the road well over an hour to take a trip that was supposed to have been less than 30 minutes away.
About the time we had gotten the driver back on track (we were going to have to retrace most of the route we had already taken in order to get to the restaurant), all sorts of warning signals started ringing on the bus. We weren't ever sure if we were nearly out of gas or just what the problem was, but the bus was in distress! The bus driver kept saying he was given "bad bus." (He didn't speak a lot of English)
We got him to pull of into a scenic area ... for a moment . .. but then he pulled right back out into the DC traffic ... bus dinging away with the warning bells ... and bus without a lot of compression. We had a number of drivers going around us giving us the one-finger salute...
Finally, the driver was convinced to pull off into a lovely park area while we waited for the bus company to send help! Some of us bailed off of the bus so he would, hopefully, not decide to reenter the traffic!!!!
It was getting late. Most of us had not eaten for hours!! The groups that rode buses 1-4 had eaten and were now just waiting on us and wondering where in the world we were!
Everyone on that bus was either a caregiver or a lung cancer survivor. You did not hear complaining. What you heard was a ton of laughter and multiple jokes. We have learned that little incidents like that make life interesting. There was no reason to get angry or uptight. I suspect if all of us had been on a bus together BEFORE we were acquainted with living with cancer, the attitudes would have been far, far worse. Trivial little things like that are indeed trivial to us now.
It ain't a picnic to have cancer, but you know, it sure does something to improve attitudes and outlooks on life. Or it has for those of us who attended that Summit.
For a hilarious account of this experience, go read what Dann Wonser had to say about it:
http://www.dannwonser.com/blog/a-little-disaster-can-be-a-good-thing/5/4/2015. You will be glad you did!
No comments:
Post a Comment