Road Bump

Oh Dear! My health hit another bump in the road on Christmas Eve while we were in Sydney.

I was diagnosed by a sequence of doctors with a thrombosis (blood clot) in my left shoulder. This caused a rather visible swelling of my arm and hand. Fortunately, Doctor AbdullahOmari - a vascular specialist at the prestigious St Vincent's Private Hospital - thinks it's not threatening. Less fortunately, he put me on two more drugs, one a fairly powerful blood thinner. This supplements an existing blood thinner prescribed by specialist Dr James Leitch to help me adjust to the defibrillator. The two doctors are going to consult about this overlap when they can find each other - a downside to our extended Christmas / New Year holidays.

Worse still, he banned me from flying for at least two months! You've heard of deep-vein thrombosis suffered by some unfortunate airline passengers. He's worried that flying might shift my clot. Anyway, the treatment is working and my swelling is going down.

This means a few more train trips. We returned to Armidale last night after a 9 hour trip from Sydney. Two events made it rather longer than usual: track work along a 15k stretch of line near Sydney and what may have been a suicide attempt. The driver slammed on the brakes about 30 km south of Armidale because some woman was lying across the line. He stopped short, but had to summon the police to investigate and they took quite a while to travel the 15km to the remote site (no road nearby). Meanwhile family members removed her and presumably took her home - we saw them driving away.

Have a happy new year everyone.

AS