"This is Wolf Blitzer reporting..."

Update: despite previous expectations, impending doom was averted and my plane landed safely in Ft. Lauderdale. I was pleasantly surprised.

Shockingly, I forgot to take a Xanax. This would have gone unnoticed, except my mother said, “Hey, did you ever take a pill?” as we were on the boarding line. I panicked before quickly realizing that taking it then would be pointless. After we landed, my father kept saying, “I’m so proud of you for flying without drugs!” Which is nice, but probably indicates the very low bar I have set for myself.

My mom did her best to distract me during the flight. She took over my brother’s responsibility of looking at every page of the Sky Mall catalog with me so I could decide which item I really need (first choice: a wooden bridge for my imaginary garden; second choice: a portable terra cotta pizza oven). My mom did provide a couple of minor panic-inducing moments, including:

1. Telling me we would find a bathroom as soon as we “hit the ground.”
2. Looking at a picture of lower Manhattan in the Continental magazine, showing it to me, and saying, “Look, the Twin Towers are missing.”

I thanked her profusely for pointing that one out. During takeoff.

Still, it was an uneventful flight, so I was thankful.

It brought to mind a very different flight she and I were on a few years ago after a quick trip to Florida.

We had boarded the plane and were sitting in the second row after the partition separating coach and first class. We settled in and had started slowly moving down the runway when a man blew past us toward the cockpit. Behind him, a frenzied flight attendant was running and yelling, “Sir, stop! Please sit down! Sir! Sir!”

Those of us in the front listened as a brawl commenced. People were shouting things like, “Stop him!” and “He’s trying to open the door!”

He did open the door. He then jumped off the plane, and was tackled a distance down the runway after officers zapped him.

It was almost silent when the captain announced over the speaker that everything was fine. He also said we would be exiting the plane so it could be inspected by “specially trained animals” – his polite way of saying “bomb-sniffing dogs.” Although, since he didn’t say dogs, I started imagining that they were little chimpanzees in FBI uniforms. Eventually, we were asked to de-plane and escorted into Continental’s Presidents’ Lounge.

It is a very peculiar thing to enter a room and see your flight receiving full “Breaking News” status on CNN. It showed that the tarmac was covered in police, fire and FBI vehicles, and that news channels swarmed overhead in helicopters. I didn’t watch much more, because I was already on the phone to my pharmacy in New York, finding out how many Xanax I could safely take and remain upright.

I stayed pretty calm, and started chatting with a woman who turned out to be a teacher in my best friend’s school. (The next night I called my friend, who said this woman told her we spoke. My friend asked her how upset I was. When she said I appeared composed, my friend said, “Are you sure you met Nancy? Short brunette girl? Blue eyes? Freckles?”)

The FBI cleared us for takeoff, and I reluctantly got back on board, unconvinced we would make it to Newark Airport safely. We arrived at midnight, and, in another first, found news crews waiting to pounce on our flight.

We found out later that the man was not a suicide bomber having second thoughts. He was just a troubled person with bipolar disorder who really hated flying, whose relatives made the poor decision of allowing him to fly solo.

I have cried before flights, been sick to my stomach, had minor panic attacks and even tried to convince my family to cancel our trip as we were boarding the plane. But I have never been Tasered after biting a flight attendant and jumping off a moving plane.

Small victories.