Carla Benning

Every bus got a pre-trip inspection. I never did.

Every bus I dispatched got a pre-trip inspection. Until this July, I never ran one on myself. The first morning I ran a school-bus pre-trip on my own body, I wrote myself up 8 times out of 10. Four of them would have kept a bus in the yard, and the first was getting out of my own kitchen chair. My hands went for the table that morning. I'm 64, and I'd been pushing off that table for a year without noticing. Here's the whole 10-point pre-trip I run on myself now. It takes about six minutes in your own kitchen. My name is Carla Benning. I'm 64. For 27 years I dispatched school buses for the county. 61 buses. About 4,000 kids. Out the gate by 5:40 every morning. Every one of those buses got a pre-trip first. The driver walked all the way around it with a flashlight and a clipboard. Tires and lug nuts. Brakes. Every mirror. The entrance steps and the grab rail. The stop arm. The emergency door. Lights. Then a radio check with me. Then the sheet came to my desk. If it wasn't signed, the bus didn't roll. 61 sheets a morning, about 180 mornings a year, for 27 years. Close to 300,000 sheets. Our head mechanic, Earl, told me something my first week at the yard. "A bus never breaks down out of nowhere. It tells you first." The pre-trip is how you listen. I never ran one on myself. Not once in 64 years. I'd bet you haven't either. Here's how to tell. On a bus, a pre-trip turns up three kinds of write-up. The first kind, you note and keep driving. A scuffed mirror. You write it down so Earl sees it Friday. The second kind gets fixed before the route. Low on fuel. Low on fluids. Nothing's broken yet, but you don't send 40 kids up Route 9 on a quarter tank. The third kind is out of service. The bus does not leave the yard. Drivers almost never reported the third kind themselves. They'd been steering around it for months. A brake that pulled a little left, and they'd been leaning right so long they didn't feel it. Here are my 10 items, sorted the same way, and how I did the first morning I ran them, a Monday in July. THE FIRST KIND: NOTE IT. 1. Mirrors. Stand sideways to a long mirror and look at the line of your upper back. Then read the height on your driver's license and ask yourself when anybody last measured you against it. Mine says 5'5". I've been 5'5" since I was 17. This summer the nurse measured me at 5'4" and a quarter. My doctor wrote it down. We'll talk about a bone scan at my physical in the spring. My Aunt Dot was 5'2" in her wedding pictures. By 80 she was 4'10". She walked bent over like she was looking for something she'd dropped. You note a mirror and show the mechanic. Mine is my doctor. Write-up. 2. The driver's seat. Next time you get in your car, notice how. Do you swing both legs in, or does it go in pieces? I drove Dot to her appointments for her last six years. She got into my car one piece at a time. A hand on the door. Then a hip. Then a long breath. That Monday I still swung in like I was 40. Pass. THE SECOND KIND: FIX BEFORE THE ROUTE. 3. Fuel. Write down what you ate yesterday before 9 a.m. Not what you meant to eat. What you ate. I started a weight-loss shot last fall. My doctor and I chose it together after years of trying everything else, and I'm still on it. I'm down 41 pounds. My back quit aching on the stairs somewhere around pound 25. I'm not here to talk anybody out of anything. But when you eat a lot less, there's a lot less room for the protein and the nutrients food used to bring. And weight loss, especially fast weight loss, can include lean tissue as well as fat. Early in July I logged an ordinary Tuesday. Coffee. Half a yogurt. Six crackers. Three bites of salmon. 34 grams of protein for the whole day. Wednesday was 29. By that Monday I'd started forcing down two eggs at breakfast. I hadn't logged a single day since. A driver who rolled out on a quarter tank got a talking-to from me in front of the whole yard. Write-up. 4. Fluids. Open the cupboard where you keep what you take for your bones. Read the backs. Mine, that Monday. The calcium pill I'd taken every morning since I turned 55. An $83 pharmacy bone formula, six chalky tablets a day. On the eleventh morning I'd gagged on the third one in the pharmacy parking lot and cried. And in the pantry, a grocery-store collagen tub with a woman's face on it. Two heaping scoops that clumped in my iced tea like pond scum. I quit after six days. Seven-eighths full. One I was taking. One I was gagging on. One I'd quit. Write-up. 5. Radio check. Every pre-trip ended with the driver keying the radio. If I didn't hear from a bus, I went looking. If you went down on your floor this morning, who would know by noon? Where is your phone right now? Mine was on the kitchen counter. I'll tell you whose else was. And two weeks before that Monday, I'd sat on my garage floor for 40 minutes and told nobody. My daughter called two Sundays in a row after church. "Fine, honey," I said. Both times. Write-up. Fuel, fluids, the radio. The cheap ones. THE THIRD KIND: OUT OF SERVICE. These are the ones you've been steering around. 6. The seat. Sit in a kitchen chair with your feet flat and the table in front of you. Cross your arms over your chest. Stand up. If your hands went for the table, or you rocked twice to get going, write it up. That Monday at 5:30 I pushed off my kitchen table with both hands, barefoot, my shin still purple from the garage. I'd been doing it for a year and never noticed. Out of service. 7. The steps. Go down your stairs the way you always do and watch your hands. Since spring I'd been holding the railing on the church steps every Sunday. That Monday I came down my own stairs at home sideways, both hands on the rail, one step at a time. Out of service. 8. The door. Open a new jar yourself. Don't hand it across the table. In March I made spaghetti for my grandson Tyler. He's 15. I handed him the jar. "You do it. Your hands are younger." I'd heard those exact words before. I'll tell you where. Out of service. 9. Under the bus. A good driver gets down and looks under the bus for leaks. Plenty skipped it, because getting back up was the hard part. Ask your doctor first. Then put a sturdy chair beside you and try getting down on your rug and back up. I'd tried that July, on my bedroom rug. I hauled myself up on the mattress like I was climbing out of a pool, and quit. I'd already stopped getting down on the floor with my younger grandson, who's 8. I blamed my age. Two Saturdays before, my car keys had skidded under the front bumper. I got down, got the keys, and couldn't get up. 40 minutes on the concrete, until I scooted to the workbench and pulled myself up by the old vise. Out of service. 10. The load. Carry two full grocery bags from the car to the kitchen, one in each hand, without setting them down. 41 pounds lighter, with a back that doesn't ache, I carried them fine. Pass. Two passes out of 10. Eight write-ups. Four of them the kind that keeps a bus in the yard. Look at the third kind again. The chair. The stairs. The jar. The floor. I had an excuse for every one. My age. The rail's there for a reason. Tyler likes to help. Four excuses. One bus. I'd been leaning right so long I didn't feel the pull. I don't know what was going on inside my bones that Monday. I still don't. Nobody can tell you that from a kitchen chair, and none of my 10 items can either. They tell you what you've stopped noticing. I want to tell you how I learned that. Because the first person I should have run it on wasn't me. Her name is Bonnie Sikes. Bonnie drove Bus 22 for the county. For 19 years hers was the first voice on my radio every morning. "Twenty-two rolling, Carla. Coffee's terrible." Never late once. She could back a 72-passenger bus into the wash bay with one hand on the wheel and her thermos in the other. She changed her own tires. And her pre-trip was the best in the yard. In 19 years I never sent a sheet back to her. About eight years ago she showed me a letter from her bone scan. A number to "keep an eye on." I didn't even look up from the route board. "Calcium," I said. She took one every morning after that. Every single morning. She was the kind of woman who did exactly what you told her. Two years ago she told me she'd lost an inch and a half. I laughed. "We're all shrinking, honey." Two Christmases ago, at the bus yard potluck, she slid a jar of her pepper jelly across the table to me. "You do it. Your hands are younger." Then I watched her go down the three fellowship-hall steps sideways, both hands on the railing. I said nothing. Count them. The mirror. The door. The steps. Three write-ups, and I watched every one from across a folding table. Me. The woman who'd pull bus 17 off the route because a driver said it was "making a little noise." That February she got up in the night to switch a load of laundry. Her hip broke in the laundry room. It may have broken before she hit the floor. She lay on the concrete next to the dryer for 11 hours. The mail carrier heard her yelling at 11 the next morning. The cordless phone was on her kitchen counter. 30 feet away. Surgery. Rehab. Then a care center two counties away, because that's where the bed was. She never went home. I didn't go see her for 17 months. Then one Sunday this July, two weeks after my garage floor, I drove out. She was in a wheelchair by the window with a blanket on her lap and her old county jacket over the chair. Her car key hangs on a hook by her door. She asked them to put it there. "I keep it so I remember I used to go places." We talked about the yard for an hour. Then she looked at me and said, "I took it every morning, Carla. Like you said." I didn't have an answer. She'd done it. Every morning for eight years. The one thing I told her to do. When I got up to leave, she grabbed my wrist. "Twenty-two rolling, Carla." I drove home and couldn't let it go. I don't know what would have kept Bonnie off that floor. Nobody does. But I know I handed her half a work order and called the bus fixed. That night I made a list of the small signs I'd been steering around. When something goes wrong, you don't panic. You make a list. Then I called my sister Patty, and then my daughter Renee, and told them everything, the garage included. "Mom. Why didn't you tell me?" I still had a pad of blank county pre-trip sheets in my desk drawer from the yard. The next morning, before I ran it, I copied my list onto the back of one and made it 10 items I could check. I ran the sheet at 5:30. Eight write-ups. Renee drove the two hours down that Saturday. She teaches seventh-grade science. She read my sheet and turned to item 4. "Fluids," she said. "This is the one you can fix tomorrow. You just fixed it wrong." She helped me write a second list on the back of a worksheet. What to look for on a label. Then she told me she'd called a man at First Methodist named Hal. Hal taught PE for 31 years. Now he runs a strength class for women over 60 in the church basement. Tuesdays and Thursdays, $5 a session, eight women, and folding chairs nobody is allowed to sit in. The first Tuesday I lifted a 5-pound dumbbell and felt like I'd pushed a bus. Hal yelled across the basement. "Good! Again!" At the end he put the mats down. "Every woman in this room is going to be able to get off a floor." A woman with a white braid pinned around her head got down and back up like it was a lawn chair. Wanda. She's 88. After class I showed Hal my sheet at the coffee urn. He read it twice, the way Earl read a bad one. Then he turned over the class sign-up sheet and drew. "Bone isn't a rock," he said. "It's living tissue. Most of the adult skeleton gets replaced about every 10 years. And it runs on what you eat every day." He drew a frame. "Collagen. About 90 percent of bone's organic framework." Then he put dots all over the frame. "Mineral, laid down on it. Calcium helps build and maintain strong bones. About 60 percent of the magnesium in your body is in bone." Then he wrote the helpers down the side. D3. K2. Vitamin C. Copper. He tapped the dots. "A calcium pill feeds this." He tapped the frame. "Not this." Two jobs. The frame and the mineral. For eight years I'd told the best driver in the yard about one of them. The tub was the frame with no mineral, two heaping scoops I couldn't get down. The box was mineral with no frame, six tablets I couldn't swallow. My calcium pill was half the job, the same half I'd handed Bonnie eight years before. Three tries at item 4. Not one of them the whole job. Hal tapped the dumbbell rack, then my sheet. "You came to train it. Now you've got to feed it." "With what?" I said. "I can't finish a tub. I can't swallow the box." "Ask Lou." Lou is Hal's wife. She's 71, and she brings a thermos of coffee to every Thursday class. That Thursday she unscrewed the lid at the coffee urn and held it under my nose. It smelled like coffee. Just coffee. "One scoop," she said. "Every morning for two years. DensiaPlus." That's all she said about it. I went home, got out Renee's worksheet, and checked that label the way I used to check a pre-trip sheet. Line by line. Nothing gets a pass because it looks official. Collagen in grams, not a "blend." Studies on collagen peptides commonly use 2.5 to 15 grams a day. Check. 9 grams of collagen peptides. Calcium, with the helpers beside it this time. Check. 660mg of calcium citrate. 1,320 IU of vitamin D3, which helps your body absorb calcium. Without enough D, you absorb only a small fraction of the calcium you eat. 132 micrograms of vitamin K2 as MK-7, which activates osteocalcin, a protein that helps bind calcium into bone. Magnesium. Check. 198mg. Vitamin C and copper for the frame. Check. Vitamin C is needed for normal collagen formation. Copper is needed to cross-link the collagen fibers. Zinc and boron too. One scoop. Not two heaping. Not six tablets. Something that disappears into hot coffee, because some mornings coffee is all I can face. Check. I didn't order it that night. A sheet goes to the mechanic before the bus rolls. I put the label, both lists, the pharmacy box, the tub and my old calcium bottle in a grocery bag and took them to my doctor. He read the label against my medication list and told me how to space my pills apart, and what to take when. The shot stays right where it is. Anything about a bone scan is his call, and we'll talk about it in the spring. The tablets went in the trash. The tub went back in the pantry. I keep it on purpose, so I remember. Then I ordered. Renee keeps a bag in her own kitchen now too. She's 39. She says she'd rather start the habit at 39 than make my list at 64. One thing I want to be plain about. Collagen isn't a complete protein. My scoop doesn't replace a protein-rich meal. Fuel is item 3 on my sheet. Fluids are item 4. You need both. The bag came in August. One scoop in my coffee at 5:40, because that's when the buses rolled. The coffee still tastes like coffee. Here's my sheet now, at the end of October. Same 10 items. Every morning at 5:30. 1. Mirrors. Still a write-up. As far as I know I'm still 5'4" and a quarter. That's my doctor's department, and the spring physical. 2. The driver's seat. Pass. 3. Fuel. Protein first at every meal, to the number Tammy, the nurse who weighs me, gave me. Two eggs at breakfast. I hate eggs. I logged another Tuesday in September and showed it to Renee like a report card. 4. Fluids. One scoop in my coffee at 5:40. I haven't missed a morning since the bag came. 5. Radio check. My phone rides in my pocket now, bathroom included. And at 5:40 every morning I call Bonnie. "Twenty-two rolling." "Coffee's terrible." 6. The seat. Hal doesn't let anybody rest in his folding chairs. The only time we sit in one is to stand right back up out of it, ten at a time. In October I visited Bonnie, and she watched me get out of the chair by her window without touching the armrests. "Nobody ever told me to practice getting up," she said. That's Hal and his chairs. Nothing else. 7. The steps. Facing forward now, one hand resting on the rail. Resting, not pulling. Hal had us doing step-ups on the bottom stair of the church basement. 8. The door. Still a write-up some days. I hand a lid to my son-in-law Mitch now and then, and I write it down when I do. Hal says a write-up isn't a failure. It's a work order. 9. Under the bus. Both hands on the mat in my fourth week at Hal's. One hand by the sixth. No hands by the ninth. That was Hal and practice, every Thursday, and after supper on my living room rug whenever the boys visit, with my younger grandson, who beats me every time. At my October checkup I sat down on the floor of the exam room in a paper gown, before the nurse could weigh me, and got back up without using my hands. My doctor walked in halfway through and made me do it three more times. 10. The load. There's a 12-pound dumbbell under my bed. Hal says next month it's 15. He ends every class with the suitcase carry, a dumbbell in each hand, the length of the basement and back. Eight write-ups in July. Two open now. The mirror, and some mornings the jar. I don't know what's going on inside my bones. Nobody can tell you that from the outside, and I won't pretend otherwise. That's my doctor's sheet, not mine. What I know is my sheet. And I run it every morning. At that October checkup I stepped on the scale, still 41 pounds down, and for the first time in eleven months I didn't ask how much I'd lost. I asked, "What am I keeping?" If you push off the table to get out of a kitchen chair. If you've handed a jar across the table and made a joke about your hands. If you come down your own stairs sideways. If your phone lives on the kitchen counter. If there's a tub in your pantry you quit after a week, or a box of tablets you threw away more of than you swallowed. If you've been taking one calcium pill every morning and calling it handled. If you've told somebody "Fine, honey" this month and it wasn't true. Run the pre-trip. Write it up. Then take the sheet to your doctor. Think about what you're keeping, not just what you're losing. DensiaPlus is 9 grams of collagen peptides with calcium, magnesium, vitamin D3, vitamin K2 (MK-7), vitamin C, zinc, copper and boron. One scoop a day, stirred into coffee, tea or water. It's the Fall Sale. Right now it's up to 70% off: buy 2 bags, get 1 free, or buy 3, get 2 free. Every bag comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee, empty or full. Carla Benning, 64, retired school bus dispatcher, pre-trip at 5:30 every morning P.S. If you take a blood thinner like warfarin, talk to your doctor before starting anything with vitamin K, this included. Calcium can affect how some medications are absorbed, so ask your doctor or pharmacist about timing. Keep taking everything you've been prescribed. P.P.S. My first sheet in July had eight write-ups on it. Four were out of service. It's taped inside my cupboard door now, next to the bag, so I see it every morning at 5:30. Two items are still open: the mirror and the jar. P.P.P.S. Up to 70% off: buy 2, get 1 free, or buy 3, get 2 free. 90-day money-back guarantee, empty or full.