Right now I'm sitting in Frankfurt at the McDonalds playplace, home to the Breakfast of Champions - french fries and milkshakes. And despite arriving at 5:30 AM (11:30 PM east coast time) with only a few cat naps to sustain me, I'm feeling a lot better than I was 24 hours ago.
Yesterday at this time I wasn't sure if we were even going to have the privilege feeling like absolute trash in Frankfurt this morning. I wasn't even quite sure we'd make it to Frankfurt at all.
It all started with me not doing my job. In the midst of our hasty departure from Dushanbe in March, I didn't renew our family's medical clearances. I knew that I wasn't being responsible, but those clearances were lower on my priority list than other things like booking plane tickets and getting CT scans.
I had time to work on them when the crisis turned out to be nothing and I just sat around my parents' house for five weeks, but I didn't. I told myself that it was because I didn't know how to get the forms, but really I was just lazy.
When Brandon joined me and we saw everything and everyone we didn't do them either.
So finally when we got to DC, less than four weeks from our departure, we filled out the forms. Stupid, I know, but unfortunately I have a gambling streak and I figured that we'd probably be okay. It had all worked out before so why not why?
After some phone calls and emails, we got the clearances put at the front of the line (umm, so we're leaving in two and a half weeks so could you get those done for us? Please?) and everyone was granted a clearance within a few days. We all got our usual Class 1 (world wide cleared) except for Sophia, who got a Class 7. I suspected that we might run into problems with her, since she'd been put on Ritalin last year, but I still hoped that it wouldn't be a problem.
It turns out that Class 7 means that our form-filling days were not over yet and we had a whole new round of filling, submitting, and waiting. Which was followed by another round of desperate, pleading emails and calls (We have tickets to leave this week so could you please look at our paperwork??).
The climax happened Thursday morning (twenty-seven hours before our flight) when we were told that Sophia wasn't going to post until we figured out a definite plan for how she was going to get her Ritalin refilled. Brandon started making phone calls, I sent out desperate pleas on Facebook for advice, and we both wrote emails to everyone and anyone we could think of to help us out. At one point Brandon asked if we should cancel the tickets, but we decided that it wasn't going to be any more expensive to change them in the morning.
After a lot of strategizing, we hung our hopes on talking to the nurse practitioner at post who was currently sleeping as it was 1 AM in Tashkent. So to pass the time we acted like we really were going to get on the plane the next day. We finished packing, we cleaned out the apartment, we finished off the leftovers in the refrigerator, went swimming, and watched a lot of HGTV. Most of all, we tried not to think of having to resort to plan B which involved moving to a hotel via a fleet of Uber cars, changing plane tickets, and hoping that someone would be sympathetic to our plight. It wasn't a very attractive plan B.
Tashkent is nine hours ahead of DC, so we planned to give the embassy a call around eleven and present our case to the nurse practitioner and see if she could help us. By ten-thirty, not only had she contacted us (Facebook plea for the win), but so had the HR officer. By one-thirty, fifteen hours before our flight out of DC, our problems had been solved and the suitcases stayed packed.
Next time, I'm filling out that paperwork six months before we leave.