Just a side note to maybe brighten your days..

two years ago i was flying with my partner who has rsd upper left side and left hip. she always uses a can and slide on shoes and since we travel frequently we have our routine down to a science. for some reason this one day they helped her through the metal detectors, and even though she didn't set them off they still decided to do a pat down. she was already feeling awful and when the gentleman went to pat down her arm i lunged forward and yelled 'no! wait!' and every TSA agent and passenger stopped and stared!! the guy stopped and i stepped backward out of the machine and kept apologizing... but the guy did too!!! he asked if she could just roll her sleeve up and everyone was actually really nice because i was convinced i just got us arrested. he had someone else take over and helped her sit and got her cane for her! it was great to see! this was JFK around 5am

(especially bc now with the full xray machines she can't hold her arms up to we usually end up staring at our carry ons for 45 minutes on the other side of the belt and waiting for someone to come over for the pat down)

I'd also like to add she recently has an IME and i ended up having to physically push the doctor off of her after she asked 5 times for him to stop and almost passed out. guess i'm still a little traumatized after that one haha