Good son slams American ignorance on Sars.
Says he and elderly mother escorted off cruise ship
Christie Blatchford
National Post
Wednesday, June 04, 2003
CREDIT: Kevin Frayer, The Canadian Press
Ravi Purushuttam, a Grade 9 student at Father Micahel McGivney Catholic Academy, fits a mask to protect himself against SARS following his lunch break outside the school in Markham, Ont., yesterday. More than 1,700 students returned to school following 10 days of quarantine after a student was treated at hospital for SARS. Purushuttam was one of only a few students wearing masks.
TORONTO - Michael Pratt jokes that if he and his elderly mother had really had SARS, they likely would have infected everyone on board and turned the Vision of the Seas into a plague ship.
But they didn't, and they didn't.
Despite that, Mr. Pratt says that as other passengers watched horrified from the promenade, he and his 79-year-old mother Dorothy were nonetheless escorted off the ship in Honolulu last week, bundled into a waiting cab and taken to the airport for a flight to San Francisco and a connection back to Toronto.
As an added bonus, Mrs. Pratt, who turns 80 this month and is a resident of the Leisureworld long-term care residence in the east end, returned to find her nursing home, like others across the city, in virtual lockdown because of the recent outbreak of the disease, and is now confined to quarters.
"It's because of their ignorance," Mr. Pratt, still seething, told the National Post in a telephone interview last night. "I hate to say it, but it's because of their American ignorance."
As "a good son," the 44-year-old manager of a Toronto trucking company takes his mother on a trip every year, and this one -- the dream of a lifetime for Mrs. Pratt -- was booked last fall with the Royal Caribbean International line, on one of their Celebrity cruises.
Yet he said that when they arrived to board the Vision of the Seas in Honolulu about noon last Wednesday, the post-9/11 security was so intense that it took them about an hour to make their way through the lineup. By the time they were handed the SARS screening questionnaire, and after two days in the blazing Hawaiian sun fresh from the Great White North, both he and his mother were red and hot.
With seven other Toronto residents, the Pratts were briefly quarantined in a curtained-off area and waited for a nurse to arrive to take their temperatures.
Mrs. Pratt's hit the magic 100.4F -- the most frequent telltale SARS symptom, such a reading is considered a benchmark of the disease -- but displayed none of the other warning signs such as body aches, fatigue or a dry cough, and, most critically from a diagnostic perspective, had no known exposure to anyone who had SARS.
"I explained that she'd been standing outside in the heat for over an hour, and was just hot," Mr. Pratt said, "and that like most people her age, she has some medication, and that the heat can affect the elderly." But a pier supervisor told them they would not be allowed to board the ship. Furious, Mr. Pratt insisted another reading be taken, and when it was, under protest, he said Mrs. Pratt's temperature had already dropped and registered 99.4F. He said he asked that the ship's doctor see his mother, but the pier supervisor insisted they would be immediately sent home, and took the pair's passports and tickets.
"My mother was visibly upset and was in distress at this point," Mr. Pratt says, "and had to be consoled by some of the staff."
When the doctor appeared, he took Mrs. Pratt's temperature yet again, and by now it had fallen to 99.3F, and they were allowed to board.
A little later, giddy with relief, they left the ship briefly for a walk, and when they made their way back, were offered a complimentary upgrade to a better cabin, had dinner and were preparing for a lifeboat drill when the nurse called their stateroom and said she had to take Mrs. Pratt's temperature again -- it was up a little, to 99.7F, but still below the benchmark level.
The Pratts duly moved into their new cabin that evening, and left at the crack of dawn the next morning for a helicopter tour to Kauai, where they spent most of the day.
When they came back to the Vision of the Seas late that afternoon, they were detained at the gangway, Mr. Pratt said, and escorted for another temperature-taking; this time, Mrs. Pratt's was down again to 99.3F. For the first time, the doctor examined her with a stethoscope, but the purser, "very stoney-faced," Mr. Pratt said, then showed up to tell them the company's risk management department at Royal International headquarters in Miami had formally declared them persona non grata, and that they were being removed from the ship.
The Miami office was closed last night when the Post phoned after interviewing Mr. Pratt, and reservations clerks there, and at another company office in California, said there was no number for an after-hours contact.
"What really pisses me off," Mr. Pratt told the Post, "is that everything was done so wrong.
"If they really thought we were SARS carriers, they should have put us in a bubble that day. Instead, they let us board the ship. Or they should have sent us to a hospital and had us checked. Instead, we went to the dining room, did the theatre ... walked around," went on the chopper tour, toured Kauai and were sent home through a major American airport, potentially infecting people all along the route.
And, he said, if the company doesn't want Torontonians "until the SARS scare is behind us, they should have the corporate responsibility to not take any more bookings from us."
He was most upset, he said, when his mother apologized to him, and said, " 'It's all my fault.' I told her, 'It's not your fault, there's nothing the matter with you. It's because of their ignorance. The doctors were very misinformed.' "
Right up until the last minute, Mr. Pratt said, they were getting mixed messages from cruise officials -- told at 3:30 p.m. last Thursday they had to leave the ship, then given another 90 minutes of potential infection time on board to get their luggage ready and actually disembark.
Royal Caribbean, he said, has pledged to refund the $6,000 cost of the cruise, their return air fare, and promised a $2,000 credit for a future cruise.
"I told them I was going to contact the papers and tell them there was a plague ship on its way to Vancouver," Mr. Pratt kidded last night, "because it's heading there on June 8. They said they'd talked about this [possibility] and they'd take their hits."
cblatchford@nationalpost.com; jbrean@nationalpost.com
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