Not many pics this letter as I have been locked up in the isolation ward…

But this is the view from the window looking out…

And from the window looking in (not that I was)

I was very convinced (can you do that? I was!) that I would be covid negative after a pcr test after 5 days isolated. I’d rescheduled the flight home, got the train ticket back to Kerang. All was looking good, the doctor appeared to have little doubt that I had recovered, and all was hanging on the result which he brought on his daily 10 am visit. Even the financial department in its correspondence with insurance company (cc’d to me) was seemingly in agreement. You can’t get better than that.

The stay here has been ok, except that the thermostat on the a/c doesn’t work, so the choice is icy blast or nothing, the food has been edible, but rarely, and the clock on the bloody wall has stopped.

The nurses are delightful; I wish I could see their faces. The masks, leaving only pairs of eyes visible, anonymise them, and it’s only through the questions they ask that I have a chance of deanonymising them.

A standard treatment in cases like mine is to give a daily injection of anticoagulant in the fatty bits of the abdomen. I guess this is to prevent the clots that some people have had in the past history of covid, or dvt. The side effect on me was some injury to the bladder or prostate. So rather alarming blood in the urine, and then effective closure of the whole apparatus. I shat. I also told the nurse, who told the doctor (who told the cow with the crumpled horn…) who instructed: no more anticoagulant. Within the day the blood ceased and slowly slowly I’m ceasing to impersonate a guy in a prostate television commercial. A relief, I can tell you.

The insurance company has been great, providing reassurance that they will cover everything.

What did the doc say? I hear you ask…

Well, according to the pcr test I’m….still….positive.

Buuuggggger

So this means I stay in this room for another 5 days, eating, or not eating, crap food , and looking forward to doing something enjoyable like a 5 1/2 hour flight in a jet back to Melbourne, or stabbing myself in the eye with a red biro.

I get discharged on Saturday morning, stay in a hotel on Saturday night, then get the plane on Sunday.

I’ve been wrestling with the payment system with Jetstar, finding universal rejection of my credit cards, as well as my sister’s. The last gasp is to ring a real person and do it over the phone. The first few times I rang they were having technical difficulties so it really appears that gods have it in for me! But finally a real person,who implied that it really wasn’t her job to deal with me, but I think was mollified by the confected desperation in my voice, came on and she shunted me to a robot, who took the cash. I rapidly checked my bank a/c … she had. Now I wait for the itinerary to appear in my inbox.

So here we are, the end of a great holiday, with some enforced relaxation at end.

With any luck I’ll be back in Kerang on Monday afternoon.

Take care all of you.

T