Travelling by plane is relatively different to trains, I’ve decided. I never flew before last Saturday and it all seemed very strange to me, going up I the air in a big metal thing. It doesn’t flap its wings, so how does it fly? I had so many questions, spawning from a sheltered upbringing in a sea of tents in the bush.
But I’ve been on trains, so I just thought it would be like that, with more distance between us and the ground. Well, it was an hour-long flight and I spent the whole thing hyperventilating into a paper bag. Not like trains, as it turns out.
Hyperbaric therapy is wonderful, I soon found out. I really needed them after I was rushed from the plane with a severe deficit of oxygen in my lungs. That has never happened on the train, I think because the maximum altitude of a train is about zero centimetres above the track, and a plane is the total opposite. Trains never even leave the ground! That’s how it should be, in my opinion.
And while the technological marvel of hyperbaric chambers, little glass or inflatable rooms that you can lie inside the get more oxygen in your lungs, is quite wonderful…the idea is to never use them. And I’m not completely blaming the plane, but my ears were doing some very strange things up there, feeling like they were filled with air. Maybe that’s where all the air from my lungs went: into my ears. That’s why I didn’t feel like I had any of it in my lungs.
Or perhaps that’s what hyperbaric chambers actually do. They take the air stored up in your ears- which fled there due to the unnatural environment of being in a metal tube high in the sky- and redistribute it to your lungs where it actually belongs. That makes oxygen chamber therapy for sale in Melbourne even more impressive, but also confirms that I never want to fly on a plane again. Suppose I’ll be taking the train back to Sydney, remaining on solid ground the whole time, hopefully.
-Ming-Na