Welp. We haven’t even made it through airport security, and our family trip to Aruba is already a total disaster: Grandma just dissipated into millions of atoms inside the TSA’s full body scan machine.
Great. There goes any shot we had of making our flight.
Traveling abroad with our frail 82-year-old grandmother was never going to be easy, but watching her atomize in a TSA scanner was on not on anybody’s bingo card for this trip. Grandma, who’s extremely unsteady on her feet these days, nearly stumbled just walking up the X-ray scanner’s four degree incline, so we were more concerned about her falling than vaporizing into thin air, which is what happened after she slowly raised her arms and let out a hair-raising scream as the machine activated and she was obliterated into a cloud of particulate matter. Yup, our tropical getaway is now as good as over—if we’re flying anywhere today, it’s to find a molecular physicist who can help reconsolidate trillions of free-floating atoms back into Grandma.
To make matters worse, our family is now holding up dozens of travelers behind us, a number of whom are cursing under their breath as they’re re-routed to a new security line while Mom and a TSA worker try to collect as many of Grandma’s atoms as they can, running plastic baggies through the air air like butterfly nets in the space where Grandma had been standing before she was reduced to a non-corporeal spray. Ugh.
A broken hip honestly would’ve been easier to deal with than this.
Vacation aside, poor Grandma’s going to be in physical therapy for years before she fully recovers from molecular disentanglement. As much as we all love her, next time we go on vacation…we are 100% leaving Grandma back at the nursing home, because this was absolutely not worth it.
