Holidays and Hospitals

We’re on R&R leave this week. For those of you not familiar with the aid world, R&R stands for Rest and Relaxation. Twice a year Mike gets an extra week of leave we can use to leave Luang Prabang and fly somewhere regional for a little mini-break. This time we’ve headed to the south of Thailand. We’re in Krabi, near a beach called Ao Nang.

We’ve rented a small two-bedroom townhouse for six nights that shares a lovely pool with its neighbors. We’ve spent the week introducing Dominic to boats and beaches, catching him as he jumps off the pool’s waterfall, and eating good Thai food (mango and coconut-soaked sticky rice, mmmmm). Today Mike’s braved the sticky midday heat to go rock-climbing and I’m stuck with the indefatigable little monster alone all …

I mean, Dominic and I get to have some quality together time for most of the day.

Looks divine, right? And it has been. It’s been a lovely treat to have some lazy days together with Dominic, and for Mike and I to have evenings and early mornings to talk without the busyness of daily routine to distract. It has been a lovely little holiday – truly restful and relaxing.

But that is not the whole picture. 

Before you open a new browser and start looking for jobs in development, here is the other side of this sun-burnished coin.

The reason we get this extra leave twice a year while we’re based in Northern Laos, is mostly because there isn’t yet any good medical or dental care up in Luang Prabang. We live at least one international border and an hour’s flight away from the nearest good hospital.

So the day we left for Krabi, we woke up at 5:30, flew to Bangkok, cleared customs, collected our luggage, caught a taxi to Bumrungrad hospital, and made our first medical appointment of the morning with a good ten minutes to spare.

It’s been almost eight months now since Mike had his microdisectomy surgery there to repair a badly herniated disc in his spine. Healing was apparently progressing well, until the sciatic nerve pain mysteriously returned four weeks ago and has gotten steadily worse. So, on Saturday Mike had his second MRI of the last year while I took Dominic to the children’s clinic to get some vaccinations and his first check up in eight months.

We reconvened in time to have a quick lunch, stopped at the pharmacy to pick up some nerve medication for Mike, and hopped a taxi back to the airport to fly further south to Krabi.

Whereupon we collapsed, exhausted.

And what have we spent most of our spare time talking about this week – in beaches, on boats, and by pools?

How on earth we’re going to manage another spinal surgery for Mike, the demands of Mike’s new job, packing up our house for the move to Vientiane, our active toddler, and getting me (plus Dominic) back to Australia before I hit the high-risk third trimester of my pregnancy on May 18th.

Oh, we’ve also talked a little about the fact that Dominic’s growth curves are diverging on the charts. He’s gaining some percentile in height (although still below the 50^th) and simultaneously dropping percentile in weight (now well below 25%). We try and try, but we cannot seem to get him to eat enough food. We aren’t seriously worried yet, but we are starting to wonder if he has picked up a parasite.

Those first two appointments at Bumrungrad last Saturday were just the beginning. This Saturday, on the way back to Laos, we’ll do it all in reverse. Tomorrow afternoon we fly back to Bangkok, and first thing on Saturday morning we head back to the hospital. We have two appointments with specialists to check on the healing and progress of the leg Dominic broke last year. I will have my 20-week ultrasound. We’ll meet with Mike’s spinal neurosurgeon to find out what he recommends and discuss dates and options, and we have a couple of other appointments besides.

Promises to be a great day.

But that’s what this week of leave is for – not just holidays, but hospitals as well.

We’re living a life of extremes at the moment. The good can be strikingly good – incandescent and unusual. Pad thai from street stalls. Soft white sweeps of beach framed by limestone cliffs. Warm waterfalls falling into tropical pools. All the best parts of living in a tourist mecca nestled by the Mekong River.  

But the bad can be similarly extreme. It’s likely that the outcome of these recent hospital visits will mean us scrambling to pre-pack our house in the next couple of weeks, more surgery for Mike within a month, and Dominic and me leaving early for Australia. It will mean our longest separation yet, Mike recovering from surgery mostly alone, and me solo-parenting Dominic for months (with the help of my own parents) while I am the size of a Shetland pony and being kicked from the inside by baby number two.     

Extremes. They add spice to life. They also add exhaustion.

Here’s hoping the rest of our medical appointments on Saturday don’t add any more spice to life just right now, because I’m not sure the system could cope. I’ll keep you posted.