This is the first in what I hope to be a short series of posts explaining how I was able to conquer some of my core life fears and anxieties. I am publishing these in the hope that this might be of some assistance to someone else on the same journey as I have been on.

This post covers specific Web-based resources and tools I used in my work on overcoming my fear of flying. It is important to remember that there is a difference between tools and actual methods and approaches. I will touch on the latter in future posts. I am starting from the business end of my fear-conquering plan and working inward.

I probably should also add the disclaimer that I have no training or certification in counseling or aiding with fears or phobias and my advice should not be considered in any way professional or medical. These are just records of my own experience.

Web Sites and Online Resources that I Found Indispensable

• Flightlevel350.com – This site amazes me. It’s free; it’s vast. There are thousands of videos of airplanes of all stripes and in all locations worldwide in (mostly) completely everyday situations. Want a passenger viewpoint of a 737 flight by Alaska Airlines out of PDX? Done. Want a top-deck 747 shot from a Cathay Pacific fleet? Done. If you are of the type that immersive-virtual experiences really help you kick into your anxieties and desensitize, this is a treasure trove. I told you that the site amazes me. I have trouble fathoming that there are so many avid aero-philes out there shooting and editing video of so many aspects of flight. Apparently just out of the goodness of their community-loving hearts. The site’s search engine does allow you to be quite specific about what you are looking for–great for obsessive folks like me who want a specific experience–but you will need to be using Windows if you want to join the pay version of the site (and thus be able to download videos for offline viewing). This is a pity.  In my particular sensitivity, sounds are a big trigger for fear. I found that going full screen on the videos here and using headphones put me in a great space to work on recovery.
• Airliners.net – This is the still-image analog to flightlevel350.com. Photographs from all angles of all things plane-like. I personally attach a good deal of anxiety to the specifics of cabin layouts in jet aircraft, so I used this site to look at interior photos of planes similar to the one I was scheduled to fly on (a Boeing 737-700 for those not paying attention to every strict detail I’ve ever mentioned). I was even able to find a recent photo of an Alaska Airlines 737-700’s first class layout so that I was looking at something very applicable.
• TakingFlight – A support site for those suffering from fear of flying, with a user forum focused on these concerns. The community is supportive and led by several professionals in the airline industry (including “Captain Hutch” and an aerobatic instructor. While the forum users are very friendly and empathetic, I never ended up posting my trials or story here. The interface is a bit clunky–not their fault; almost all Web-based forum software sucks–and I’m surprised that user traffic is as low as it is. For such a common terror, aerophobia doesn’t have a huge online community presence (unless I missed something).
• SeatExpert – A site whose entire raison d’etre is detailed seat data about every major carrier’s aircraft down to the last overhead bin. A great resource for locating the best (and worst) seats on a given plane. While this is geared as a regular traveler’s resource (not for freaky fliers like myself), I found it comforting to be able to verify that my seat choice was indeed a great one, and prepare for what the aircraft would be like.

Other Web Sites

• SOAR – One of the most popular for-pay fear-of-flying programs. It looks comprehensive and complete, and comes with real human support. However, it is fairly expensive and–holy crap they completely redesigned their Web site within the last few weeks. What an improvement! It’s amazing what a facelift does for its image. SOAR has been around for a long time (their site claims 1982) and comes with guarantees. A few hundred bucks will get you a multi-DVD course with other materials.
• FearOfFlyingHelp.com – This is a free online course-let created by Captain Stacey Chance. It’s a collection of information and YouTube videos that unfortunately blow up both browsers on my machine most heinously (many, many embedded YouTube videos per page) and the layout is a bit wonky. However, it is a warm-hearted, not-for-profit, community-based resource and as such I am thankful for it.
• Fear of Flying Help/Tips - One of the few fear-of-flying resource aggregators I was able to find on the Web. It’s a bit stale but has some useful links.

Reflections

There is a strange balance of what is available to the fearful flier online. There are a large number of–excuse the phrase–rather fly-by-night companies, looking to make a buck or two by peddling self-help books and courses. Some look more reputable than others.

The lack of large online communities surprises me and makes me wonder if I somehow didn’t find the big place where everyone is hanging out. If one in six people indeed suffer from at least significant flying-nervousness, it seems bizarre that there wouldn’t be more of a crowd here. What good sites do exist are mostly crufty, 1990s-looking affairs clearly whipped together by the non-web-savvy. More power to them, of course, but where are the larger organizations? Missing, it would seem. Maybe there just isn’t enough money in this. Or maybe most people really do need personalized, professional help, the kind you can’t sell on a Web site.

Next up: books and audio books…see you next time!

Tags: aerophobia, anxiety, fear, fear of flying, help, resources, tools

Satellite views like this one are what make conspiracy folks and lovers of the mysterious have “squee” moments.

View Larger Map

In Oregon’s remote Christmas Valley, coming upon this military installation of debated purpose is certainly eerie. The Internetty consensus is that the establishment has something to do with Over-the-Horizon radar or some such–at least according to GlobalSecurity.org. More from GlobalSecurity.org:

The US Air Force’s over-the-horizon-backscatter (OTH-B) air defense radar system is by several criteria the largest radar system in the world. Six one-million-watt OTH radars see far beyond the range of conventional microwave radars by bouncing their 5-28-MHz waves off the ionosphere, an ionized layer about 200 km above the earth. It was developed over 25 years at a cost of $1.5 billion to warn against Soviet bomber attacks when the planes were still thousands of miles from US air space.

Most sources I’ve seen agree that it is of a Cold War bent and is no longer operational (although the same sources list its completion date as 1990, a bit late for catching Kruschev in the act or whatever).

I have driven near it with Mr. Pencil on an occasion or two, but we’ve never found particularly good access to get up close to it. Plus we generally avoid any areas where we might get strafed or bombed if we intrude. But I do find ominous and inexplicable sites in mid-nowhere quite interesting. I think most people do.

Apparently, recent Obama administration legislation has seized upon a new opportunity for the site, as seen in this March, 2009, Oregonlive.com article:

The two senators also wrote a $475,000 provision that will allow a truck-climbing lane to be built on Interstate 84 near Three Mile Hill and $380,600 to investigate the possibility of using an old military facility in Christmas Valley for generating solar, wind, and possibly geothermal- power.

I know of a few other creepy and abandoned sites in Oregon. There are the ghost towns (like Blitzen and Hardman), and isolated chemical-industrial things like the nerve gas hummocks near Umatilla or the cement complex at Lime. Do you have any favorite, creepy spots (especially those that perk the ears of the conspiracy folks)?

Tags: military, mystery, oregon, Travel

The first thing in my life that I both recall and can put a date to are two vignettes from May of 1980. One is scouring a closet with my mother for a red bandanna to tie around my face, the other is a dim, gray moment-memory of an ashen street scene.

So, I can say with some truth that I remember the Mt. St. Helens eruption. I was two and a half.

I grew up here. I not only recall (albeit vaguely) the eruption itself, but, being in a journalistic family, I know its legacy and its impact on our local psyche. I know its causes, its histories; I’ve chewed the fat with involved scientists and gungho reporters who violated boundary restrictions to be the first to fly helicopters over the smoldering craters. I had a surreal overnight camping adventure with a professor (in a geodesic dome in the middle of the park in front of Smith Memorial Center at Portland State Univ.–this is a long story) who managed to get himself stuck on the side of the mountain when a tree blocked his only way out. Et cetera.

Yet I have never once (at least to my recollection) been to any of the visitor centers. I had not, even, set foot within the National Monument itself. This is not a badge of pride, and so today David and I fixed this marked glitch in my otherwise consitent regional adventure/travel record.

Most of the exhibits in the several centers we visited repeated things I already know. I took a lot of geology and earth science in college. But I did learn three new things, which I shall share with you! Lucky you!

1. The glacier that formed around the lava dome in the crater after the eruption is the youngest glacier in the world. It was greatly pissed off and melty after the lava dome activity of 2005.
2. The landslide and debris flows from the eruption covered and then boiled the Toutle River and local groundwater. The resultant trapped steam exploded in places, geyser-like, and created craters as much as a quarter mile across. In a landscape of such monumental disarray it’s easy to miss “smaller” details like this.
3. Because of the way sound waves were directed–relatively straight up, then bouncing off the atmosphere somewhere up there–a “cone of silence” existed some 60 or so miles around the eruption. Those, like me, in Portland, would have heard nothing. In Eugene, it was another matter: many solid minutes of dynamite-exploding, thunder sounds. Even people on the very flanks of the mountain only heard the local sounds of trees snapping and rocks falling, not the eruption itself.

I’d like to revisit with my family and see what their recollections are of the event. I’m sure my parents would have clearer memories.

Mt. St. Helens from Johnston Ridge.

Tags: adventure, local, mountains, recollection, science, washington

A HIDA scan, which stands for hepatobiliary iminodiacetic acid scan, creates pictures of your liver, gallbladder, biliary tract and small intestine. A HIDA scan can also be called cholescintigraphy, hepatobiliary scintigraphy or hepatobiliary scan.

A HIDA scan is a type of imaging study called a nuclear medicine scan. This means the HIDA scan uses a radioactive chemical or tracer that helps highlight certain organs on the scan.

– MayoClinic.com

Here I am at Beer and Blog, a continuing event I attend nearly every week, but cannot say that I have ever actually blogged from here–but I am going to right at this very minute. Picture Portland on a sunny Friday afternoon–warm, but not too warm; the kind of weather we put up with eight months’ misery every year for–and about fifty geeks and their various diaspora on the patio next to the Green Dragon, under the shade of ailanthus trees*. With WiFi. This is, as the traditionalists would phrase it, how we roll.

As Christie reminds me, I am behind a bit in keeping people up to date, health-wise. Assuming that things hold steady, I’m hoping that this can be my last health-related blog post for some time.

“Is he dead?” This was asked by a disarmingly attractive man of about thirty, whom I’d never seen before, without preface.

“That’s the word,” I answered gamely, rolling my head, as much as this was possible, away from the TV on the wall–CNN’s insistent, repetitive and commercial-free coverage of the Michael Jackson situation–and toward him.

“Oh, I’m Steve. I’m a tech,” he said. A tech who, besides asking morbid questions about a pop star, didn’t have relevance in the room I was in. I was busy being prone, hovered over by a radiation-spitting camera tracing my liver and gallbladder onto a CRT across the room, just white-black two-dimensional shapes of internal organs, evolving, refreshing every several seconds like radar. Fading, in, out, organs changing as radioactive chemicals distributed themselves, got absorbed. There was a rogue, striking young guy in scrubs, who also happened to be a total stranger, staring at me while Michael Jackson died and I was prone, splayed like a bug, and he could see projections of my insides. I felt a bit exposed. He wandered off and I was submersed immediately into the same ennui that attends those Moebius Strip cable news network reports, speculation, speculation, an anchor’s specious affectation of concern. I was trapped.

If you have to have a HIDA scan, take note: It takes a long time, and you won’t be able to do much while it happens. Reading? Out of the question. I brought a book, a solid, hardbound edition of The Three Musketeers clocking in at several pounds. This was foolhardy. If you imagine someone on their back, flat, beneath a big cube of machinery, you can also realize that reading would involve putting arms in front of abdomens and thus blocking things. I also neglected to bring a human with me, for discourse. This is an oversight I regret.

Here’s how it goes. First they IV you–my main tech, Mark, did this with admirable alacrity–and then they fill your IV tube with the dye-thing-that-behaves-like-bile. This is all well and good but takes for-ev-er. Your sole consolation, at St. Vincent Hospital, at least, is a wall-mounted TV. I can tell you with recently refreshed data: ain’t nothing on the TV. This is how I ended up on the CNN endless loop. I should also mention that the TV was on my extreme right, which meant I was looking at it completely sideways, with my head turned while lying flat, which is one of the fastest routes to motion sickness I know.

After a long ass time, more than an hour, begins the real test.

“Most people, I’d say 85 percent, feel nothing,” Mark explained as he started the slow injection of the hormone that would cause my gallbladder to empty abruptly, “Think of this like a simulation of a very fatty meal–it’s going to cause you to dump a bunch fof bile.”

For the other 15 percent? Mark danced gamely around this, describing the sensation as “noticing that…something’s happening” to “cramping” to the eerily-vague “symptoms.” Fortunately I was of the former category and felt only the slightest flutter under my right shoulder blade. This went on for half an hour.

HIDA scans require you to go foodless and drinkless for much of the day. This was the gravest discomfort I experienced yesterday. Starving. Staggeringly, deeply and clamorously starving. Stuffing face with cookies and banana leaving the hospital, that’s a moment.

Dr. Gravitas called this morning to tell me what I really already knew.

“Your gallbladder emptied normally,” he said. I knew because I had watched its egg-sized lightbulb shape grow a tail on the monitor during the procedure. I watched my own gallbladder deflate and fill my cute little bile duct with goop. Neat.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I feel like I’m wasting everyone’s time. I feel completely normal now. I don’t know what happened.”

“You are never wasting time,” Dr. G assured me.

And really, something did happen. Something life-stopping and profound. But I may never know what.

As for now, I feel…great. The sensation of normal after such prolonged off-ness is something like a natural high. I can eat! I can walk down hallways! I can focus on a task! This is good stuff.

By now you might have heard, or maybe you were party to the chaos all along as I Tweeted the hell out of my Vegas experiences. I got pretty sick while I was down there. I still don’t know what ailed me–I see Dr. Gravitas tomorrow morning–but it set me on tense-edge and I’m still feeling entirely wary. Essentially, every meal I had gave me heaving pains within an hour or so, to the point that, by Saturday night, I realized I’d have to basically fast until I got back to Portland. At least if I had any hope of getting on the return flight. Writhing in bed most of Saturday, I skirted the edges of “freaking out”: being sick and scared in a weird and disinterested city; worried about my ability to face flying again.

This farce involved a surreal cab trip to an urgent care clinic in Las Vegas (the cab driver made David type in the address into his navigation system, among other oddities). This was mostly a fruitless endeavor because, without my medical records (why, why are we still in the stone age with our medical record technology?!) the overwhelmed staff at the clinic wasn’t able to do much useful for me. They put me on an IV, ran some tests, gave me a “GI cocktail,” seemed to hold me in low esteem, and booted me back toward my hotel. We sat outside waiting (and waiting) for our return cab while an extended family arrived in several cars, shrieking and panicky. One of their number, a pretty, skinny girl of maybe 13 or 14 years old, was the most panicky, and, as things unfolded, turned out to be the focus of the hullabaloo. From what I gathered–it wasn’t so much eavesdropping as just being there–she’d been grabbed by some guys, pulled into an alley and had a gun put to her head. Sounds like they then tried to have their way with her but she put up such a fuss that they gave up. It was a tragic and worrisome moment as they tried to figure out which hospital to go to (the urgent care clinic didn’t have the right expertise).

Overall I am left with a nasty taste of Vegas. David got a cold and is surly as a result. It’s pretty sad that the return flight was one of the better parts of the trip. And I still don’t know what’s wrong with me. Such a frustration to my psyche that the weekend of one of my biggest personal triumphs is clouded by stress and pain.

I’ve been eating some meals and I don’t seem to be going into throes of agony anymore. Perhaps it’s over. Maybe I’ll never know what was wrong. But I am annoyed by that. And worried.