This is a report for Mission 265 by Grace on Wings.
Departure: Wichita Falls, Texas
Arrival: Muskegon, Michigan
Date: September 27, 2013
Mission 265 Report
There I go assuming again!
When we received the request to fly Dellasue B, 92 years old from Texas, to her daughter’s home area in Muskegon MI, I figured it would be a quiet/uneventful flight. Amazingly at her age, she had still been living alone and fell and broke her kneecap.
Her daughter was driving back and we’d have Dellasue by herself. Most elderly that we serve are pretty sick, can’t hear very well, and never get the hang of talking with the headsets on. I even decided to do a second mission that same day because I thought we’d be eager for a patient to keep us alert!
Medic Dannielle and I flew out to Tulsa to meet up with Hal after his annual required retraining and then it was a short 50min flight to Northern TX to pick up Dellasue the next morning. I was dozing as Hal said “beginning our descent” and then the controller asked him if he was familiar with the airport.
Hal said negative and the controller said “910-November-Foxtrot you are cleared to land on the center runway-you have student fighter pilots in the pattern landing on the right and left runways.” What?? That sure got my attention. We soon were ecstatic to see fighter pilots on both sides! What an awesome display. We walked into the terminal area and the mostly military area was eager to help us-being a new color on the tarmac!
Dellasue then arrived and although she’s about 3 feet tall now-she has all her faculties and talks nonstop! She even talks to herself-when she asked for some candy to help with her pain medicine’s bitter taste-she couldn’t decide and then said out loud “Oh Dellasue quit being so picky.” Her long-time church ladies where there to see her off and we gathered to pray. She had a tear in her eye because she’s probably leaving her home area for good.
We loaded her in the aircraft Nellie and she asked about the ministry and thanked us for our service. Then we put the headsets on her for engine start up and she never missed a beat. She was enjoying a root beer sucker and renamed our flight the root-beer express!
She continued to tell us all about her daughter and “her no-good ex-husband” and how her granddaughter graduated from Oklahoma and how she has a great job and then all about her grandson and his life. She kept asking which one of us was married to the pilot-and he seems like a “great man” and I should keep him. I asked when she lost her husband and she said it was fifty years ago-but she was married “long enough.”
She asked if our route was taking us near Chicago-and I told Hal to let us know when we neared Chicago.
She said she had to be naughty and “thumb her nose up at the City that birthed a president.” And sure enough she talked politics to us and indeed did the gesture when we passed. Dannielle and I were laughing hysterically.
Dellasue continued to talk all the way down to the runway. The Rootbeer-Express had landed and her daughter was there to greet us and asked how the talk (flight) went. We kissed her goodbye and I just had to get the Dellasue-famous gesture on camera!
What a fun flight-I want to grow up and be as spunky as she is!