Vacations and Special Needs

I’m usually pretty guarded when it comes to building up time off, or a vacation, or some special event. I am guarded because more time than I care to remember our plans have been changed due to something connected to special needs.

This summer it was our vacation at the beach. It was with my parents and my sister and her family. We’d looked forward to it all year because it’d been several years since we’d been to the beach together. Maybe that was where I got in trouble; it was really important to me. We had a scare with my son’s transplanted kidney. The first day of vacation the care team called to tell us they feared his body was rejecting his transplanted kidney.

I was really disappointed. My son was out of sorts all week, the rest of us were as well. When it was all said and done, we had about 3 full good days at the beach (but my son did love to see Batman, when we enticed him to the big city 70 miles away for re-check labs). I’m over it now. Mostly.

I figure the amount of disappointment was equal to the amount of my (stupidly) forgetting briefly that we should not plan – absolutely plan – on things panning out the way we’d expected. That’s not a negative way that I think about life, it’s a realistic one. Flexibility has always been something we tried to strive for, given our family situation.

This was a huge reminder to be flexible. It’s the one thing special needs families should have an abundance of, right?

Is flexibility your key?