A trip to the hospital...

Day 51 – 53 – Nov 20-22

Sorry for the lack of updates – it has been a very stressful couple of days. As many of you know, Katie had a health complaint that resulted in a trip to the ED at the local hospital in New Smyrna Beach – Advent health – and then admission and two nights in the hospital total. I have to say, it has not been the best hospital experience, and our local hospital is Box Hill, which is a pretty low bar – and I would say that my preference would be Box Hill back home!!! I won’t go into the details of the emergency – only to say that Katie is now fine and we are able to continue our trip. It was a bit of an ordeal and while the nurses were all wonderful, the level and standard of care was constrained by the resources they had at their disposal. There also seemed to be very few actual doctors – part of the delay in getting discharged was waiting on seeing a doctor. We did get to see a nurse practitioner who was great, but even she had to wait on the doctor as well. The other thing that really got to me was that during all the drama in emergency, a lady came up to me demanding payment upfront in the form of a deposit and just adding to the stress. I mean - she made me pay a USD $1000 deposit. Surely they could just get all our details and wait until just before discharge - it's not like she went over treatment options and prices. When I asked - what happens if it's less than $1000, she basically laughed and said, there was no chance of that - they had only just started. She mentioned a CT scan could cost over $4000... So yeah, that really added to the stress. The whole time I was just worried about costs, when really you should just be worried about treatment. Thankfully before we left, I decided to go with comprehensive travel insurance. I discovered that in Europe if you get hospitalised there's some reciprocal arrangements - however, the USA charges through the teeth. So, the insurance was very expensive when I added USA to the policy. I spent just under $1300 – Looks like that was a good investment. Think I should get most of the money back and they should cover the costs. Fingers crossed.

Anyway, ordeal over – we can now focus on heading over to Deland for thanks giving and then we are off to Universal studios and then finally San Francisco before arriving back in Melbourne on the 8^th of Dec. I will post some thanksgiving updates.