The bumpy road back: Australia to Laos

Here are some of the highlights of our return to Laos (It’s a bit long, I’m warning you, but so was our trip. And you’ll have to imagine the soundtrack of crying children.)

I wake up with a hideous cold the morning we have to leave.

Get interviewed at the airport by Channel 7 about whether I’m worried to take my precious babies to Thailand given the coup/martial law/curfew situation. Missed my opportunity to say on national television that Australia could do with a good coup of its own right now. Rats.

Spend nine hours on a plane with two very over-stimulated children who are themselves getting sick. Resolve, once again, to send a personal note of thanks to the producers of Play School, as that was the only thing that kept Dominic quiet for a couple of hours.

Clear customs in Bangkok, collect all our bags, and try to find the driver we’d organized to pick us up. We finally connect at 9:10pm, and leave the airport to the sound of police sirens telling people to move along. Make it to the hotel with a whole 21 minutes to spare before curfew and spend the next two hours trying to get our children to sleep.

Yes, I’m 9 months old and only have two tiny teeth, and my parents are letting me eat a whole apple I pilfered from my brother.

It was 1am. They were desperate.

Snatch about four hours of sleep. Alex wakes up and wants to play. Mike heroically stumbles out of bed, takes him downstairs to the lobby, and hands him round to strangers – hotel staff on the night shift and Thai women on the, uh, “night shift”. Eventually Mike brings him back upstairs and feeds him the half a bottle of milk that had been sitting out since the night before. As Mike explained it to me later, the Thai prostitute downstairs had told him that Alex would go back to sleep after he had some milk, the leftovers were all we had available, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. However, Alex neither goes back to sleep nor gets food poisoning, so that one is a draw.

Given the behavior of our petite traveling companions, we make a desperate last minute decision to try to catch the 11:40am flight out of Bangkok instead of the 7:40pm flight. Mike turns on the charm at Bumrungrad hospital to get them to move Dominic’s appointment up from its scheduled 9:30am. I throw our bags together and check out. We make it to the airport before check-in closes for the morning flight. There are standby seats. We make the flight. Just.

Last to check in at BKK airport. Mama still able to smile on command. Barely.

Get back to the house at 2pm to find 99-degree weather (that’s 37 for my fellow Australians), our car hemorrhaging oil, and no electricity. We spend the next three hours until it came on sitting on the back porch with the hose on the kids.

Welcome home kiddos. This is your new pool.

One feverish or snotty child or the other is up every hour all night long.

The next day we are juggling a sick mama, sick kids, and a Herculean unpack when the electricity goes out again. Before it was fixed five hours later (after merciful Sunday afternoon intervention from our landlord, an electrician, and the Lao Electricity company) the temperature reached 109F (43C).

I almost lost my mind.

I began to seriously consider taking the kids back to Australia and telling Mike he could join us there when he was done here in Laos.

You know the problem with having someone in your family get cancer (apart from the fact that cancer can kill and that treatment really sucks)? It makes you feel weak when you struggle to cope with what are, objectively, lesser challenges. I was exhausted, sick, and completely paralyzed by the heat on Sunday. I was also felt pathetic and small for feeling so utterly, completely, miserable. I haven’t yet worked out how to put things in perspective globally and still give myself permission to have bad days.

There have been a couple more bad days in the last week, but nothing on the level of our first 48 hours back. I survived those first few days by the skin of my teeth and with the aid of antibiotics and friends who bought meals and cheer around. We spent Mike’s first “morning back at work” all sitting in the waiting room of the French clinic. But we’re starting to surface now.

We’re mostly unpacked. I have taken our December calendar and my shopping lists from the week of diagnosis off the fridge. It was an eerie experience coming home to a house frozen in time five months ago – Christmas decorations and all. We’ve hidden the kids’ Christmas presents (which they never unwrapped before we left) and we’ll probably just use them in August and call them birthday presents. Bonus. So we’re slowly learning how to embrace mid-year, and the electricity has stayed on. We have no water at the moment, but, whatever, the AC is working. As long as the AC works I will (most likely) stay sane.

Alex: “I wouldn’t hold your breath on the sane, but I’ll keep you posted.”