Here we are a week into another debacle with a different airline and I am already seeing a familiar pattern from a year ago, which doesn’t feel so good. The initial post of the situation goes viral, people click the share button and express a few lines of outrage which gives the illusion that you are on the cusp of monumental change and the airline scrambles to put out the fire in the media while initiating the long process of repairing your stuff. The only difference is that this time it culminated with my ugly mug on TV.

This is when the hangover starts to set in.

Because despite all of the incredible support and attention my situation has garnered, I am still sitting in a seven-year-old chair with 1/10 of the battery life of the one whose carcass was just picked up yesterday morning. Life goes on for everyone else, but my battle is just getting started. It took six months to get the last one fixed, and my wheelchair rep says I have weeks at least before I’ll see this one again.

I can’t overstate how inconvenient that is to nearly every aspect of my life, which is already pretty tough with the whole paralyzed-from-the-neck-down thing.  I’ve spent the majority of the last seven days emailing legislators, filing complaints, and running all over God’s green earth trying to recover a bunch of items that were lost or broken between the round-trip flights. In other words, it’s back to the grind of life which is how momentum dies.

And that is my biggest fear.

I don’t want all of this discomfort and frustration to dissipate over time and become just another speck of dust swept under the rug for an industry that is too big for accountability. Because this story isn’t just about me, it’s about all of us. It’s about three of my good friends who were abused by this system in the last month alone – two of which had their chairs broken within hours of mine, and the other fell out of the clipboard on wheels they call the aisle chair and broke their tibia.

It’s about the people who would end up stuck in bed for days, weeks or months because they don’t have the ability to keep a backup chair in working order like I can. It’s also about the countless people who won’t even attempt to fly for fear of winding up with broken equipment, bones or both and have their story buried under 30,000 other disability claims against the airlines each year.

Which is why I need your help.

Right now, the Air Carrier Access Amendments Act is being reviewed by the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, where it could easily die without significant bipartisan support. Click here to see if one of your senators sits on that committee, and then click here for a template letter to personalize and tell them just how important these changes are to you, me and the community.

At the end of the day, I can go multiple weeks or even months without my chair if I must. I’ve done it before. But this story and its message can’t. I don’t want to look back a year from now and feel the same way I do about the last time I went down this road, with little to show of my troubles other than a handful of snarky tweets and useless flight vouchers. Let’s keep the momentum going and see how far we can push towards substantive change.