liam getreu

After more than a month in hospital, I’m finally able to go home today, albeit for only a few hours.

My latest treatment is TPN: total parenteral nutrition, which is being given through a central IV line in my chest. It means that I get all the nutrition I need through my veins and don’t have to rely on my bowel to absorb food. Because my gut’s pretty screwed up. There’s a giant narrowing and blockage sitting there in the small bowel that needs to be removed. But I am so malnourished and skinny that surgery is too risky, which is where TPN comes in.

But the good thing about TPN is that it can be given over only, say, 18 hours, leaving six hours where I can be disconnected from the pumps and roam free! I’ve been going out and wandering around a bit — I went to the city with Mum, and gone outside and downstairs a few times — but this is the first time I’m having an adventure. Home should be good. It’ll probably be hard to leave when it’s time to go home, but it’s better than not going at all.

And then tomorrow the adventures continue! I have to go out to university to enrol in my course, and then defer for another six months. That should be good. Hours of waiting in line… Fun… At least I’ll be outside. :)

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged anything, almost three weeks to be exact. And a lot has happened in that time. A lot to set back my plans for the next few weeks. Well, maybe few months…

Since I got back to Melbourne in what I thought was reasonably health, everything took a turn after I saw my specialist. Turns out I was sicker than I thought. My doctor decided to take a blood test with astonishing results. Most important things were dangerously low. So low that had I have gone from normal to those kind of levels quickly, I probably would have died. I’d clearly been sick for a while.

So the last two weeks have been full of treatment at the wonderful Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. I got a whole lot of potassium and phosphate infusions, five blood transfusions, high doses of steroids, and of course nutrition. And tomorrow I go under anaesthetic for a colonoscopy so doctors can see what’s actually going on inside me.

But I’ve managed to have a bit of fun. Because I’ve been in hospital over some big days — Christmas (okay, so I claimed it), my birthday and New Year’s Eve — I’ve been getting out of hospital more, and ‘enjoying’ my stay more than usual. On Christmas, for example, the charity TLC for Kids brought around pressies for the adolescents on the ward: brand spanking new 2gb iPod Nano. Nice stuff I thought. And then for my birthday I went gambling at the casino for the first time which was cool, and then bought myself a nice birthday present as well. I’m now enjoying this wonderful product along with the RCH education department’s wireless Internet service. Technology’s great, eh?

And in the meantime, I’m going to be in hospital for another week or so. Hopefully my Internet access and further fun with my laptop will continue. God knows I’ve got lots planned. Finally, a big thanks to everyone who’s sung out their hellos since I’ve got back, and their best wishes to me for my birthday, and to get well soon. It’s really nice to hear friendly voices on the phone every now and again. Peace!

I blog this to you from somewhat sunny London LHR, having had quite an interesting few days to say the least. Without boring you — my extensively large e-audience, I know you’re all out there! — with gruesome details, it involved me shlepping from next to Berlin’s Tegel airport, where my hotel was, to Berlin’s Schoenefeld on the other side of the city one day, then back again the next to try and sort out the problem without success. Back to Tegel then to fly to Heathrow where, even though El Al insisted that QANTAS would re-issue my ticket, they refused, and so did El Al. I was told that I needed to go into El Al’s main London office on Oxford St to do it. But with my flight to Melbourne in only a few hours, it was an impossibility to get there, and make my flight.

So what did El Al have me do? They left me with no choice but to spend a night in London and wake up early to find the El Al office. Luckily I got a hotel, the Grange Fitzrovia at a very discounted rate, and eventually managed to find it. What a disaster! And then today: I had a great free breakie at the hotel, all I could eat (Prednisolone makes it a lot!) English breakfast, and then struggled to find the Oxford St office that’s not really on Oxford St. Finally, with everything sorted by 1pm, and hours of running all over London, I got a chance to see some sights. I’d seen Oxford St having walked up and down trying to find El Al, and then went on to play Monopoly — I saw Oxford Circus, Piccadilly St, Bond St, Regent St, and other amazing landmarks. I also went into Fortnum & Mason, the Queen’s groceries supplier for a peek — pretty nice me thinks.

Decided then that the airport was the way to go — I was buggered and just wanted to rest. I came, I checked-in (fingers crossed I’ll get my luggage), tried to scam myself into the lounge and failed, and now I’m using the wonderful Internet facilities at the 18 pounds a pop Holideck at Heathrow, where I’ve got all the trimmings of a normal lounge, but with the hit to the hip-pocket. Well worth it though, the last hour has given me time to discover some very interesting things: some new Firefox gadgets, the new CMS I’ll upgrade to when I get the time to ditch Wordpress, and also a couple of new Gmail features.

My flight boards in about an hour, and I think I’ve been online for long enough. Hopefully this is the end of my sagas, and I’ll arrive smoothly into Melbourne on Saturday morning. Hopefully.

Europe Trip 2005 — over. I lasted two weeks, and I guess in hindsight that was a pretty good effort, yeah? Here’s what happened: we got to Berlin and after a couple of days of touring around (got to see the Jewish Museum, Checkpoint Charlie and the Allied Museums — all brilliant, but lots of reading) I noticed that my feet were particuarly swollen. Uh oh. “That can’t be good,” I thought. It wasn’t, as it turned out.

So after shlepping to the Allied Museum, we shlepped all the way to Charite university hospital in Berlin Mitte. They said that I couldn’t stay there because I wasn’t 18, and I had to go to the Kinderklinik on the other side of town, but that they would transfer me. So they did, and eventually, after a lot of fussing and bothering, and to-ing and fro-ing, I was diagnosed with a severe lack of Vitamin K and protein in my body caused by a major flare-up of my Crohn’s. Uh oh.

So I’m now back on the steroids (fun, fun, fun!), declared un-fit to travel, and on my way home — half-way through my first real venture into Europe — via London and Singapore. At least I’ve learnt some valuable lessons for future trips: take a rucksack, travel during summer, and don’t bother with a Eurail pass (as handy as it was to just rock-up to the train and find a seat, sometimes it was hard to find a seat; it would have been better to buy each ticket individually and pay an extra €3 to reserve a seat at the same time).

(I get home to Weet-Bix and Nutri-Grain on Friday morning, and I’ll endeavour to digitise my travel diary onto my website within the first week-or-so.)

We decided to get a decent breakfast while we were in Zurich. It is, after all, the home of the rich. So after a while we settled on porridge. It was so cheap and plentiful. Between that and some milk and loads of honey, we managed to get it for the same price as a McDonald’s breakie would have cost for just one of us, so it was a good option.

Breakfast shlepped on, and then some of us went back to bed because the weather wasn’t too flash outside. It wasn’t terrible weather, it was just drizzling a bit, and it wouldn’t have made for nice walking around. But after it subsided we went walking into the centre of town looking for what we really wanted to see – Swiss bank vaults on Bahnofstrasse.

And, thanks to yours truly, we found one. While we were walking down Bahnofstrasse we saw some great things: funny signs, lots of Bratwurst, and of course lots of rich Swiss banks. We decided to go inside one of the banks just to see what it looked like. I mean, it couldn’t hurt, right?

Once we were inside, and not very impressed, we were about to leave when I spotted an elevator. I thought to myself, ‘it couldn’t hurt, right?’ and we were straight for it. Down, down, down we went into the deep underground of Zurich. (Okay, maybe it was only a two second journey, and when I say “deep underground” I mean a bit below street level.)

Luckily, the lady in the bank was really nice. I went up to her, explained that we were backpackers from Australia and wanted to see what the famed Swiss bank vaults were like. As expected, she spoke perfect English, and was happy to oblige, explaining the various methods of banking, the types of vaults they had, and even gave us some Lindt chocolate balls for the road. Ain’t Swiss people the best? (As long as it doesn’t involve giving back Jewish money stolen from them during the Holocaust. They didn’t seem to be too good at that.)

After wandering down from one end of Bahnofstrasse to the other, tasting local culinary delights along the way, we eventually ended up the world’s largest indoor Christmas markets, which were inside Zurich’s train station. Again, we wondered around getting free stuff. There were some nice stalls of cheeses and meats, as well as some small crisp-like chips that even though weren’t very tasty, were free, so we weren’t going to complain.

For dinner we went to the local kebab shop and got chips, kebabs, burgers, hot dogs, sandwiches, pretty much everything. It was an expensive dinner, but was quite tasty, and we seemed to get an authentic Zurich take-away dining experience, so we weren’t complaining.

That night we went out to celebrate how cool the Swiss were by going to a coffee bar and talking to locals. It was late-ish, and I was tired, so I walked home in the snow (how amazing!), and the boys went out to find a bar and came back not long after.

As much fun as Zurich appeared to be, we decided we were going to leave the next day. It wasn’t such an exciting, albeit beautiful place, so we were bailing.