Dear Reader,

My adventures with the Australian healthcare system started almost from the day we set foot in the country. The UK and Australia at the time of writing have a reciprocal healthcare agreement. This means as I understand it, any emergency or critical medical care that I may need whilst in Australia. Anything outside of these bounds like a GP appointment would be something I’d have to pay for myself.

The Medicare system does sometimes cover appointments like specialist scans, and some visits to the GP. However, in my experience it can vary with what is covered in this system depending on where you live. When I was living in Sydney for example we were fortunate to have a GP who used this system and I only had to pay for prescriptions. This is not my experience where I am living currently in Melbourne.

Although I can claim some Medicare funding back this means I am always out of pocket some amount of money. At the worst period of this year when I was seeing my GP nearly once a week, the monthly budget as you might imagine became very tight.

In March I found myself in hospital for a week. Well, I didn’t find myself there, the truth is it was both planned and not planned. It was planned in the way that there were discussions of the possibility of needing surgery for quite a long time. Although it was for a couple of months only just a possibility..

I am not going to go into explicit details about why I was in hospital. However, my doctors at the time were becoming increasingly concerned. So we went from confirming with the doctor about needing a surgery to having it done only two weeks later, through the public medical system.

The time it took from me consenting the surgery to me being operating on did not leave enough time for thinking. It was an almost autopilot mode, I didn’t quite realise what quite an impact that the surgery would have on me and whether it would even help me. Or even the physical changes in my body I would experience. Luckily I am at peace with the scars it has left me with. I’ll be honest I was never expecting to be an inpatient in a hospital in Australia. Let alone without my parents being around.

My partner Colin and his parents were there to support me through the whole ordeal. We were lucky enough to have their support for two months whilst I was in the major part of my recovery.

My anxiety before I went into hospital was around my hearing, my deafness ‘plays up’ from time to time. In times past, my parents would talk to the doctors for me and it wouldn’t matter if I missed anything important. This time though, being away from home the experience was very different.

In hospital Colin was only allowed in the hospital ward to see me for one hour a day because of COVID restrictions. Of course they would tell me nothing important whilst he was there much to my annoyance. Every time he visited me it felt like Christmas. Being able to talk to my parents at any hour of the day was also a big motivating factor for me to get better. Even in those first few days when I was completely incoherent.

My inpatient experience was mostly very positive. There were a few nurses who wouldn’t listen when I said that something wouldn’t work on my body and were surprised when I was right. My doctors were fantastic, and a month post-surgery gave me the good news that I was all clear.

I am excited to share that it has been three months since my surgery now and I’m mostly recovered. This week to celebrate I am going to very gently go back to swimming and build up my strength again to what it was pre-surgery.

In more exciting news.. later this year a project that has been put on hold for a year is finally coming to fruition, watch out for the next blog post where all will be revealed…

Look after yourself and see you next time

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Email me if you would like to discuss anything I have written in this blog article.

Credit to the main photograph on this page goes Marcelo Leal on Unsplash