It’s weird to write a whole post about a car, isn’t it? Although I have alluded to this before. But this car has been with me for almost my entire adult life. Maybe my entire adult life, considering I always felt I was behind my peers by a few years or ten.
In another lifetime, I worked for Honda North America. I wasn’t at a dealership. I was at their legislative affairs (lobbying) office in downtown Washington, DC. When I started, I was driving an Oldsmobile Delta 88, a real boat of a car I had “acquired” from my parents after my mom died — primarily because I had been doing all the driving while she was dying — and just sort of kept.
About halfway through my time at Honda, I had to give up my beloved boat. Washington has great public transportation, which I had been using all my life, but there was no question of whether I would be getting a new one. I had too many doctors’ appointments in places where the metro (subway) just didn’t go. And Honda had given me a free parking space in the middle of the city. Who was I to turn down such a boon? It just wasn’t done.
I knew exactly what I wanted. It helped that working for a car company had a) familiarized me with how cars worked, and b) given me access to what every feature of their cars cost. Armed with all of that, I went to the closest dealership and did exactly what everyone said I shouldn’t:
· I went alone.
· I skipped the test drive.
· I bought it on the day.
It worked out, and I got the car for about $500 under dealer cost. Then, it felt like an accomplishment. Now, it feels like it was a rite of passage.
That still doesn’t explain why I am writing about a car in a patient advocacy blog post.
It’s not enough to say that it was around for every job interview, every boyfriend and break-up, each new niece or nephew, every friend’s wedding, every funeral, every relationship that grew into my chosen family, every . . . everything.
That includes all of my post-diabetes diagnoses, so about 75% of what I’ve got now. That car got me to all the appointments where I built my trusted care team, allowed me to go where I needed to. It was there as a safe, quiet space for the appointments where I knew another medical shoe was going to drop, and the ones where surprises raked me across the coals. It was a place where I could brace myself for the pain of surgery or sing at the top of my lungs to celebrate a low A1c or higher eGFR.
It’s where I came into myself as a patient, processing things no one could help me with. It’s where the first threads of my advocacy were born. (My best ideas come either while I am driving or in the shower.) It’s where I learned to deal with my more difficult symptoms, pushing through chronic nausea, and learning where the boundaries lie.
That car was where I medically grew up.
And after almost 21 years and 250,000 miles, I had to let it go. There have been issues for a few years, and I let one of them become a major issue (transmission) that was too expensive to fix.
It was really hard to drive it out of my garage and watch as the charity I had chosen towed it away. (Anyone familiar with Car Talk on NPR?) It feels like the end of an era.
But the end of one era means the beginning of another. I don’t really want to go into a new era. I am too much a creature of habit and comfort zones. But I am not who I was in 2004 – who is? -- and it could be interesting to see if my relationship with the new (used) car is as meaningful as the last one.
One major difference, the increasing severity of my motion sickness every time I go somewhere and I’m not driving, tells me I will be spending at least as much time in the new car as I did in the old one.
The way I get attached, it’s sure to mean something.