This holiday was all about a week of escaping: the shitty weather in Holland (well, we have certainly struck gold on that front, I hear it’s been quite cold at home and it’s been over 25 degrees here every day!), getting away from our normal routine of work etc. (more for Ed than me), having a change of scenery and not being in the house all the time, and finally trying to escape as many reminders that I have cancer, as possible.
We both had a sense of guilt at the beginning of this week about not even intending to do anything.. normally we would at least go and visit a national park, city, do a trek or some kind of tourist activity etc. but this time we are not even pretending to plan to do that. Initially we felt a sense of guilt about that, coming on holiday just to laze around?! What kind of monsters are we?! Well, the way events have unfolded…just still being here and having the opportunity to laze around is appreciated. Any guilt has well and truly disappeared.
So the weather, apartment complex, apartment, food etc. are all amazing and it has been so great to be somewhere different. However, unfortunately the fact is that we have been reminded that some things really are better at home, not least the health care system. We had, of course, hoped that we wouldn’t have the opportunity to sample or compare hospitals here with ones at home, but sadly, we have.
You would think that at this point in the holiday we would have been up on our quota of sleep… but our sleep pattern is really out of the window now. After the flight and only having about 4 hours’ sleep, we were looking forward to a good night on Tuesday followed by long lie-in, but Edgar ate something that didn’t agree with him (could have been the rabbit, or just a combination of the heat/tiredness/stress etc.) and he was throwing up all night, so he got no sleep and I didn’t get many hours or any quality sleep. Wednesday we took it easy, I was reading and dozing a bit by the pool and then had a bit of a swim late afternoon; that was the next mistake. I did a few ‘laps’ of front crawl, suddenly got a really chesty cough, got out and started coughing up blood! When I saw the blood on the tissue, I really panicked.. luckily I was only about 20 seconds from our apartment, so I went straight back and called Ed, coughed up a second time and spat it out in the sink in our bathroom. It wasn’t pints of blood but it was bright red, you don’t need details but it wasn’t just a bit of phlegm with blood in.
Shit, I was still dripping wet from getting out of the pool and shivering with cold/fear. I showered and then we called the hospital at home. They advised us to go and get it checked out at a hospital here, the university hospital in Santa Cruz, in the north of the island, about an hour away. We got there, went to A & E, registered and explained (in Spanish – the admin staff and most nurses didn’t speak English) what had happened. I showed them all my documents and then we waited. I think by the time we arrived it was about 20.30 and I probably got seen by a doctor around 22.30, then waited some more, had blood taken, got an x-ray done, then waited over an hour for those results and eventually, got told that they couldn’t see anything sinister (well, more sinister than the tumour!) and that it was probably to do with exertion! They had organised a bed for me… but I really wanted to go back to the apartment, so I asked them if they were happy for me to leave which they said was fine and so I went to find Ed. He had been expelled from the waiting area once the doctor had done the initial consultation and the nurse who came to take blood was a sergeant major in white coat, make-up and big earrings, and told him in no uncertain terms to get his bag and wait outside the A & E exit. We eventually left around 2 a.m. and got a taxi home, got back to our apartment around 3 a.m. and probably got to sleep around 4 a.m. Another sleep-deprived night.
Going to A & E is never going to be a pleasant experience of course, but going in Utrecht is a much more calming experience than here and not just because it is familiar and there are no issues with language etc. The state of the building was quite poor.. it wasn’t just the fact that it was old, it just didn’t look that clean. The whole organisation of seeing patients seemed inefficient, with lots of nurses and lower-level staff wandering around, calling people’s names, delivering food etc. but hardly any doctors actually seeing patients. People were shipped from one waiting area to another at each stage of the process, forced to walk the corridors in white hospital tunics and wait some more. It wasn’t particularly warm or private so when doctors came to give information, sometimes it was just in communal areas. All quite strange. Having said all that, the doctor I saw was very kind and thorough and he spoke quite good English so I’m grateful for that. He gave me a copy of my medical notes with test results and final recommendation “Don’t do any big efforts” (= no physical exertion!)
Both of us were really shaken up by the whole experience, that on top of the lack of sleep meant that neither of us were very fit for much on Thursday. We hung around, had lunch at the complex and had been planning to go out for the evening and have a nice meal but neither of us had much appetite and were both still knackered so we ended up coming home early and watching some TV.
Friday was a better day but the pain in my back/leg is pretty constant now so I have to really time taking painkillers carefully otherwise I have a gap when they have worn off and it’s really quite hard to ignore. I am back to the having hot baths, at any time of day or night to soothe it whilst watching series on Netflix as a distraction. After a very lazy day, we went into town for a late lunch/early dinner and went to a restaurant recommended on TripAdvisor for paella. It was really good food, nice location, overlooking the beach (which was still packed at 17.30) and it felt like the first time that we were really on holiday. So nice to be able to enjoy it. On Wednesday I know we were both preparing ourselves for the fact that we might need to cut the holiday short and fly home, so it’s such a relief that we didn’t have to.
Yesterday was lovely, I spent the day by the pool… not in it, have not been in since Wednesday, out of apprehension if I’m honest. Not that I mind too much, I’m quite content lying on my lounger, , reading my book, dozing and watching other guests. Watching other people around the pool is entertainment in itself. I am quite surprised at how many different nationalities there are here – I wouldn’t say one nationality dominates, which is really nice. There are Spanish, Finnish, English, Russian, and other Eastern Europeans whose language I can’t quite identify… even heard some French, but not much Dutch….. (he-he!) . Anyway, that makes for interesting anthropological observations… the age-old ‘towel on sun lounger’ experiment is still a good way of establishing behavioural patterns. Our apartment is literally just above one of the pools so early in the morning, from our window you can see who is laying out their towel to get the best spot. There was an English couple who had claimed the same spot every day until they were ousted yesterday by a Russian mother-daughter team! The English ladies had to shift three beds to the left and didn’t have a view of the lower pool….mmmm, controversial.