Stranded in Saigon

Went out for a 'shit walk' in Saigon this morning, for about two hours. There's nothing wrong with my bowels, it's just the environs of Saigon are less that appealing at the moment. Dirt, stench, broken pavements, constant traffic noise. Beep beep and more beep.  I've learned to cross the roads like a native. Basically, don't look, just walk steadily across. If you look, you might panic and try to dodge. Not a good idea. Motorcycles, cars, buses tend to avoid the pedestrian. I say that yet sister, Reggie, got a nasty bump from a motorcycle when she was walking along the pavement a couple of years back.

Saigon is actually a fascinating place, as is the rest of Vietnam. That's why we're back for a fourth visit.  I'd highly recommend it, and could just about suggest a great travel itinerary for anyone who's interested.  The food is brilliant, and cheap.

This trip, however, has wiped any smug travel smart-arsed-ness right off my dial.  Have already said how bleak you feel when you've done something really dumb that was avoidable.  Well, it's gotten worse. 

I'm focusing,  in my mind's eye now, on a man on a skateboard this morning.  He was resting his pelvis, where his legs used to be, on the board.  He was propelling himself with a short piece of dowel with a handle on it.

Who am I to complain?  Always someone worse off.  And we're not in a tsunami or anything.

But we're dealing with our own little bit of shit due firstly, to 'our' carelessness - not mine; Al's. (Just sayin'.)  Secondly due to Tet.

After we'd reported the loss of our passports to the police in Hoi An, and obtained the required 'letter' we rang the Australian Consulate in Ho Chi Minh City.  An English speaking woman there told me to get to HCMC ASAP because it takes 48 hours to get an emergency passport and exit visas.  We are due to fly out of Saigon on January 27.

We visited Sinh Tourist - best travel agents BTW, with offices in the major tourist places - and were told that we couldn't fly south, nor could we catch the train, due to having no passports.  We had to brave another 'sleeping bus'. (Only try that if you're young, flexy, thin and have a bladder that can endure. It's lots cheaper than flying though.)  We also found that the buses were pretty fully booked, due to Tet travel, so we had to wait for three days for seats.

Another 20 hours on buses. Awful.

We arrived in Saigon on Friday at six. Of course the Australian Embassy would be closed for the weekend. Stymied again, we tried to make the best of it; find our 'happy place' which usually involves a walk, a look-see round a local market with squirming live things in shallow bowls and copious amounts of alcohol. (It has a calming effect.)

What we weren't expecting was that the Australian Embassy would close for the entire duration of Tet.  It's possible that it may open tomorrow, but chances are it won't open until January 27, our departure date.

And what I personally wasn't expecting, was that the retina in my left eye, like its counterpart on the other side, 12 months ago, would partially detach from my eyeball this morning.  Didn't see that one coming.  At least I know what's happened and that I'm not having a stroke or a diabetic retinopathy bleed.  Didn't know that when it happened last time. Quite hair-raising in the list of scary stuff that can happen to you if you're getting on in years and you happen to be short-sighted.

Have to say that my resilience is amazing me. And there is a certain symmetry in matching scrawls on my eyeballs.

Fingers crossed that our luck will change and the Australian Embassy will be open tomorrow.  

Down and out, nearly, in Vietnam

Ever wondered what it's like to lose your credit cards, cash and passports in a third world country?  Al and I are in the process of finding out.

Also finding out about sleeping on cramped buses overnight, then swapping to another cramped dirty sleeping bus for the second part of the journey from Ninh Binh in north Vietnam, via Hue to Danang and Hoi An.  Big ride that one.  Potholes. two lanes.  Suicidal traffic.  Top speed maybe 70 k, occasionally, but mostly about 50.  All up, about 20 hours.  Because foolish me wanted to do the overland trip, rather than flying and seeing nothing.  Didn't the fact that we were the only old people on board tell me anything?

Picked up sleeping bus in Hanoi originally.  Thought it seemed all right.  Was only a 2 and a half hour journey.  Bus was near empty.  We can do this, we thought.  Not bad at all.

But Ninh Binh onwards was quite different.  Caught the bus an hour after it was scheduled to leave.  Told through hand gestures that after removing and plastic bagging our shoes we needed to squeeze down the back.  Hard enough in itself.  Two sleepers were left.  In a dark, barely ventilated, coffin-like pod.  Immediately started hyperventilating of course.  Sat hunched over for a while - no head room.  Eventually battled claustrophobia and settled. Slept, sort of, through a bumpy dream beleaguered few hours of the night.  Not so poor Al.  He's tall and didn't fit.

Ordered off bus at Hue.  'You take taxi.  Meet at office.  1.30.'  Can't describe - nor want to - the tone.  Let's call it imperative.

Which office?  Where? 

Some local touts put us in their dodgy van and 4 k and 'three dollar US' we were there.

Quick lunch, then onto a different older bus for the Hue to Hoi An leg.  More spacious, but grotty, with a suspicious little stain where a previous bumhole had been on my lift -off mattress.

Who cared?  Al was totally bloodshot, but I'd snatched a few naps along the way.

Finally arrived in Hoi An, a place with which we're quite familiar, having sojourned here on three previous visits.

Maybe that caused us to relax a little.  Or perhaps it was relief to get off the bus after 20 hours.  But that was when Al left his money belt on the bus.

Upon discovery, he left me forlorn on a darkening corner and ran back to the drop off point.  We'd already seen the bus leave but the driver was contacted within 20 minutes of us leaving the bus.  He hadn't picked up any more passengers, and 'he knew nothing'.  And that's the line at Camel Travel, the bus company.  What can they do?  We're the idiots abroad.

Sunday today, so police and Australian consulate are having a slow day.  We have a bit of cash, given my secret emergency stash.  Who knew I'd need it?

The worst thing:  that feeling of despair, sick in the tummy, when you're a grown up - old now - and you've done something really dumb.  All the rest is a first world problem which I hope will be fairly easily resolved tomorrow.  Spoils the beautiful Hoi An day though.

Christmas Cheer.

For some unknown reason, we had our Xmas breakup at the local lawn bowling club - the last bastion of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and/or Catholic at leisure, maybe. No idea what to expect, apart from the stereotype of the elderly Aussie lawn bowlers' hangout.

Signed in - Fraudster, C/- The Windsor, Melbourne.  My nostrils were assailed by something foisty, faintly mothbally, and something else; essence of je ne sais quoi.

'Don't like the smell.' Fraudster curls lip, sneers a bit.  'Smells of old.' I'm sitting there at noon on Thursday before Christmas, kitted up to out-do a Christmas tree.
'Quite like it,' says Work Husband, guarding his pot of beer.  'Reminds me of my great-grandfather's house.'

The rest of the staff arrive.

'Don't forget to sign in.'

We sit in a bar around capacious ten-seater Formica topped round tables.  As people make their way across the enormous wooden dance floor, some of them trying out a few tap steps along the way, their faces, too, take on that look of searching for the source of the odour.

The brick bowling club dates from late 'fifties or early 'sixties.

'Perhaps someone could pop back to school to get some music,' a teacher suggests, given the echoey bleakness of this old people's place, bedecked with pennants from bowling comps past.  But that wasn't to be.

'We're here for a spit roast.  You can bowl later if you want to.'  That's our officious, put upon staff association leader, who'd organised the venue and catering..  (A coup was mooted by some of the young things last year, but ultimately no one either cared that much come the new year.  Or dared.)

I sipped my 100 ml of Chateau Cardboard wine and tried, unsuccessfully, to savour the ambience, like waiting for a game of bingo to commence.

We lined up like refugees for our 'meals'.  It was the usual spit roast fare, or what was left of it by the time I got up there, not being one to enjoy queuing for fifteen minutes in a pair of, for me, moderately high heels.  It was nutritious, I suppose.  The beef end was quite tender.  I don't eat much.

Then the floor show:

An aussie gent, sixty-something, Ted, in washed out striped polo shirt and shorts, unceremoniously held up a used Bandaid - sticking plaster.  'If any lady's lost the Bandaid off of her nipple, I've got it here.'  Embarrassed laughter ensued briefly.  Is that what the old 'ladies' do to prevent high-beams penetrating their bowling shirts?

Unabashed by lack of appreciation for his jest, Ted held up the wire stopper from a bottle of champagne.

'How long's this wire?' he shouted.

'What do you mean?' called one of my colleagues.

Ted frowned, a bit put out.  He spelled it out for the idiot.

'If you unravel this wire, how long is it?' Jeez, dumb teachers or what?

'Why?' called another temeritous soul.

Finally he explained that it wasn't a trick question, but a competition.  Ah!  The correct guess would win a bottle of wine.  Next question:

'How many hankies high is a horse?'  Huh?

'Men's or ladies'?' called a female teacher, getting into the spirit of it.  He reached behind the bar and produced an ironed, folded men's handkerchief.  Ostentatiously, he shook it out, grabbed it by two diagonally opposed corners and held it up for his captive audience.  Can't remember the answer.  I'd downed three 'cardies' by that stage.

I approached the bar.  Ted was the barman now, floorshow being over.

'Diet coke, please?'

'You don't look like you need a diet coke,' He narrowed his eyes; leered at me. Perhaps I only imagined him licking his already wet lips.  Wink.

'Ahahah!'  Hilarious. 'Thanks, but I'd like one anyway.'

'But you don't need it!'  He cast a raunchy eye over me, grinning lasciviously.

'Oh!  Ha ha ha, too kind.'  I tittered  'Can I have a diet coke, please?'

'You don't need one, love.'  Same deal.

'Look, I actually have diabetes.  Can I please have a diet coke?'

At that he changed tack; beckoned me along the bar, away from the others waiting for drinks.

Here we go, I thought.  Wants to share his own diabetic trials, or those of his dead grandmother.  Go with it.

Rictus smile on my face, I indulged him.  He waved me closer, the better to hear his confidence.  Okay.

With one elbow on the bar, grinning, catching me in an eye-lock, he recited some doggerel.  For about two and a half minutes.  A long time for me to smile and occasionally shrug politely, to feign interest.  Wasn't really focused, given 300 ml of chardy, that early in the day.  But the protagonist of the poem, a dog, was 'piddling' here, there and everywhere.  Meanwhile, a heavily made up, coiffed bowling club lady, ceased polishing the bar, to lend a delighted ear.

The rhyming punchline of his recitation, which he'd waited perhaps forty-five years to deliver?  'That dog's got diabetes!'

Unbe-fucking-lievable.

'Can I have my diet coke now?'

'No, you can't.  We've only got Pepsi Max,' he said, grinning like an imbecile, pleased as punch.

Merry Christmas.

That piece of doggerel?  The piddlin' pup.

Being at the mercy of tradies.

I ‘hooked up’ – to use modern parlance – with my husband, Al, because he was tall, good looking, well built and athletic.  Chemistry.  He also cooked breakfast when I had sleepovers.  He was, and remains, kind and considerate.

When we moved into our rental house, we didn’t have to do home maintenance.  Al did paint the bathroom once.  It looked all right.  Who cared?  We were renting.  He also installed a bamboo blind in our front room.  He got it backwards so the draw string was on the inside, against the window.  No matter.  He removed the blind and got it round the right way.

Al cooks.  Every night.  The best spaghetti marinara ever on Saturday nights.  He continues to give good breakfast in bed too. He's been a great dad to our two kids.  He can do complex mathematical calculations in his head in an instant.  He's a fair gardener.  He can do heaps of stuff.

But he can’t do ‘home maintenance’.  And neither can I.

As home-owners, therefore, we’re at the mercy of trades-people. 

After 25 years I decided it was time to replace a grotty jerry-built hall cupboard.  Do you know how hard it is to get a tradie to even return a call?

After hours searching the net and making phone calls, leaving messages that didn’t get responses, finally got through to a carpenter who seemed interested in taking on the job.  He asked me to phone through some photos, which I did.  He sent back some rudimentary drawings then quoted close to $10,000 to build a largely chip-board, melamine lined two door cupboard.  WTF?  An entire bathroom renovation not that long ago cost that much.

Perhaps he didn’t want the job so over-quoted it.

The only other person who returned my call - a ‘handy man’ -  was Costa.

Costa said he’d ‘make a few calls’ to his friend the cabinet maker and see what he could do.  Having done that, he quoted less than half the price of the other tradie.  With only two options, I ‘commissioned’ him to do the job.

Here was the rub.  He wanted, up front, $3,500 – most of the cost - before he’d take on the work. 

‘Youse’ve got to see it from my point of view.  If youse back out, I’ll be stuck with a cupboard I can’t do anything with.’ I suppose that was a fair call.  He seemed polite.  Didn’t let the black strands combed over his bald pate put me off.  Bells were ringing, but I gave him a cheque anyway.

‘Youse’ll have your cupboard finished in five weeks, once the cheque clears,’ he said, writing a receipt in one of those receipt books you can buy in the stationery section of Big W.

That was on October 14.  On December 8, we were still waiting for him to start the job.

‘What youse’ve got to understand,’ he said when I called, ‘is that everybody wants the job done before Christmas.’

‘But when I gave you a cheque on October 14, you said it would take five weeks.  See it from my point of view.  I’ve paid you $3,500 up front, and you haven’t started the job yet.’

‘I’ve been a business man in this area for twenty years.'   Costa was arcing up. 'Do you think I’m gonna run off with your money? $3,500 is nothing, anyway.’  

‘It’s a lot of money to us.’  He couldn’t really argue with that.  Moved me up his priority list.

The other source of anxiety?  What if he was crap?  I’d handed over heaps of money without having any idea whether he was up for the job.

Costa almost finished the job yesterday, December 15.  He proved to be polite, and did a clean job, but he kept weird hours.  He only did half days.

‘Are you doing another job?’  I demanded.  Well, I was interested in knowing how it worked. ‘Or do you have to look after your mother?’ He’d told me when I’d interrogated him at the first meeting that he was thirty-eight, single and lived with his mother.  Amazing what a nosy person can discover.

‘Mornings just don’t work for me,’ he said a bit too loudly.

So Al and I took two consecutive days off work to let him in.  It’s taken three half days and a couple of unscheduled after hours visits to do a job that could have been completed, as far as I could tell, in a day and a half.. 

The door knobs aren’t quite aligned, but overall, he’s done a good job. I trust the $400 I’m still to pay him will be enough incentive for him to return in the new year and ‘finish the seams.’

Meanwhile, I needed an electrician to replace the thermostat displaced by the demolition of the old cupboard.  Booked the electrician; took yet another day off work.  The bastard didn’t front.  No call; nothing.

At that stage I was prepared to live without heating until autumn – it’s summer after all.  But I made one last internet search and called some random electrician.  Lo and behold, someone answered the call.

Next day, right on time, two thirty-something sparkies arrived and briskly completed what looked to me like a tricky job.  Up and down the ladder; ‘fishing’ for flex behind the walls, as they do.  Swept up after themselves.  Great legs.   

I was curiously aroused.

And as soon as Al gets home, he'll cook dinner.  I've only had to replace the cupboard once, but I get dinner every night.  So you can stay, Al.

Diabetes Pity Party Over

Bit hung over from the Diabetes Pity Party.  Should never have gone there.  Shouldn’t have indulged.  It’s too addictive.  Like alcohol - well, middle range chardonnay* - diabetes could control my whole life.

Used to regularly visit, and comment on, www.diabetesforums.com.  It was hugely supportive when I first started pumping insulin and needed some insight from other pumpers.  But it became repetitious; tedious.  Hundreds – probably thousands – of PWDs banging on about diabetes in its various forms. 

I’m sick of reading and thinking about diabetes.  It’s enough having to live with it.  But I’m caught in a bind.  On one hand, I’d like to ‘unfollow’ all those diabetes Tweets/Twitterers/bloggers (whatever!) because they make me focus more on all that stuff.  On the other hand, there are some brilliant people blogging/vlogging very effectively about diabetes.  The social media thing has allowed me to correspond with some of them.  Communicating with like-minded people is a massive part of why I write.

And another thing.  My brief dip into the Diabetes On-line Community seems to have revealed a strange correlation between PWDs and Christianity.  As a born again atheist, this really gets up my wick.  I won’t go into that one.  Enough there for a whole conference.

So I’m going to cull a few people on Twitter today.  I don’t need extra crap – albeit about diabetes – to read.  Get enough of that from my less able students of English.

Time to get the diabetes cart back behind the horse.

Can feel my hang-over lifting already.

*  Confession:  I'll drink cheap chardonnay.  In fact for want of something better, I've imbibed that awful 'Dalat White' when travelling in Vietnam.

Diabetes Makes Me Cry

 A former endocrinologist – the ‘brilliant young doctor’ who cared for the diabetic part of me for 25 years – wrote a letter to my GP explaining that he was giving up his small private practice.  In the letter he said that working with me had given him an insight into the ‘psychological burden of living with diabetes’.

It’s the emotional side of diabetes that’s so hard.  Because it just doesn’t go away.  And it gets worse.  (Hello, burgeoning retinopathy!) A relentless journey.

Here’s my tilt at Diabetes Awareness for the second Blue Friday.

Yesterday morning, I was sitting on a wooden ‘park bench’ in the foyer of the building where I’d just had my three monthly visit with my endocrinologist.  I needed to take a minute. to recover.

My bike pannier bag was beside me – I’d cycled the eight k into town.  I got my phone out and called my husband.  I told him my HbA1c was creeping up – 7.8 for those in the know.  I lost control of my chin, lips and voice at that stage and a few tears leaked out.  (The HbA1c ideally should be under 7 to avoid 'complications' - retinopathy - blindness, kidney and heart disease, neuropathy, and the rest.)

Trying to control this bastard condition is nigh on impossible, despite my best efforts.

A week prior to this appointment, I’d attended the local pathology centre for a fasting blood test.  ‘Small sting now,’ said the nurse, as usual, before digging into the vein on my left arm.  Easy to say.  Those injections inevitably hurt, but they’re usually quick.

I go through this process – the blood test followed by the endo appointment, where I find out whether I’ve been a ‘good enough’ PWD – person with diabetes - every three or four months.

Too easy.

But my blood result – my HbA1c - is too high.  My endo is sympathetic and we’ve worked out some sort of ‘action plan’ which I won’t bore you with.

This is the thing.  Diabetes is my ‘dark passenger’ – apologies to Jeff Lindsay of Dexter fame.  I try to hide it when I’m going about my daily business, trying to pretend I’m normal and as capable as the next person.  But it affects everything.  I rarely sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time for fear of  hypos – when my blood sugar drops to dangerously low levels.  Have to wake up and test my blood sugar to be sure.  Every morning begins with a finger prick test so I can feed the data into my pump – that little genius – and it can calculate my insulin needs so I can infuse the right amount into my body – through a cannula that’s inserted into some part of my ‘trunk’.  (Gets rotated/reinserted every three or four days.  Fun.)

Any carbohydrates eaten must be accounted for and balanced against the amount of insulin taken.  The pump calculates it all, with a bit of input from me.

If I’m cycling to work – 7 undulating kilometres – I have to factor that in, too.  Which in these happy insulin pumping days means reducing, for ninety minutes, the rate at which insulin is delivered.  I pedal hard up those hills, but I usually have to stop mid-ride, to check my blood sugar again.  I struggle to get those numbers right.  If it’s too low I have to stop; eat some glucose; drink some juice.  If it’s too high, well, I’m laughing because I can pedal flat out for the rest of the ride. 

You know, I’d really love to just take off on my bike and just enjoy the ride, without having to prepare for it and monitor it.

So, finger pricks.  About ten a day.  Fewer on my days off when I don’t teach.  Wouldn’t want to have a hypo when I’m in front of a class of 25 teenagers, most of whom are ready to pounce on any vulnerability.  And the pump?  It’s doing its stuff 24/7.

As a PWD – Type 1 – I can never be spontaneous without serious risk to my health.

A few of my stats:

I’ve been cycling for about 50 years.  I’ve been a secondary English teacher for 32 years.  I’ve been in a relationship with my husband for 32 years.  My son is 25 and my daughter is 23.  I’ve had Type 1 diabetes for nearly 31 years. 

Can’t seem to shake it off.

And BTW, I'll be glad when Diabetes Awareness Month is over.  Cos I'm sick of thinking even more about it.

Blue Fridays

Blue Fridays in November is about diabetes advocacy.

I’m supposed to wear blue every Friday in November and advocate about diabetes.  The thought doesn’t thrill me. 

There was no Diabetes On-line Community – DOC – when I was diagnosed in 1981.  There was no line to get on. 

Back then, I was admitted to a hospital in country Victoria, where I’d failed the glucose tolerance test, taken during a family holiday.  I slumped soon after that hit of glucose and was carried, by a doctor, to a hospital bed.  I raged for a bit; had a cry for a couple of hours.  But I responded well to a single shot of insulin.  By the time my family arrived that evening to hold a vigil at my bedside, I was cracking jokes about being able to eat as much powdered mustard as I liked because it was ‘free’, according to a pamphlet I’d been given.  Carb-free, for those not in the know about just one of the elements involved in managing diabetes.

Spent the following week in an eight bed very public ward at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.  Successfully injected myself on the first attempt.  Surprised by how easy and pain-free it was, despite my former horror of injections.  

Each morning, for the rest of my life, it was emphasised, I would require a single injection of a mix of long and short-acting insulin.  I’d inject myself, after I’d gauged my blood sugar level. 

Like this:  first thing in the morning.  Empty bladder.  Ten minutes later, catch the next bit of pee in a jug.  In a test tube, using a dropper, mix six drops of this urine with six drops of water.  Drop a tablet into it.  The cocktail fizzes.  Check cocktail’s colour against a chart.  Thus see how many ‘pluses’ of glucose are in one’s pee - how sugary it is.  Take more or less insulin accordingly.  (How primitive!)

Had to do the same thing in the evening, at six o’ clock.  Carried my little chemistry set around with me.  Often did this procedure in the ‘ladies’ at the local pub on a Friday after school.  What larks.

And the other thing was that I had to eat by certain times, because on only one injection a day I had to eat when my insulin ‘peaked’ in its action, otherwise I'd have a hypoglycaemic reaction.  Low blood sugar.  Bad.  (And they are!) This had all been explained to me during that steep learning curve week in hospital.  I’d also been given a crash course in carb counting by a dietician who drummed into me the nexus between carb counting and good blood sugar control.

Back then there was no nutritional information on foods.  The only sugar free soft drink was Tab Cola.  Gold Crest manufactured a ‘diabetic’ range of cordials.

I was discharged from hospital with a supply of syringes, insulin and testing gear.  It didn’t last long.  We didn’t have a National Diabetes Supply Scheme back then.  I tried to buy syringes in a pharmacy across the road from my school and I think the pharmacist called the police!  I found out from the local diabetes association that there was a 'diabetic friendly' pharmacy in the city where one could buy one’s supplies without suspicion.  Syringes weren’t cheap either.

There was a sort of ‘tourist excitement’ to all this which turned into ‘culture shock’ after about three weeks.  It was a hell that I endured for a year, at the end of which I was wraith thin and constantly sick with a variety of ailments that thrive on excess glucose in one’s system.

And then I found a brilliant young doctor who was into multiple daily injections and ‘home glucose monitoring’.  Lucky for me.

That was thirty years ago.

It’s my day off today.  I’m wearing a blue-grey tee-shirt and blue jeans.  Quite sure I won’t be telling people about diabetes today, other than through this blog, which perhaps five people will read.

We’re not supposed to talk about people ‘suffering’ from diabetes.  But you know what?  I have suffered.  And apart from battling with this condition on a daily basis, I’ve had to suffer people’s ignorance and insufferable, almost prurient curiosity about it.

Tip:  when you meet someone with Type 1 diabetes, don’t ask them if they should be eating whatever it is they’re about to eat.  And don’t tell them about your grandfather, or other close friend, who died of diabetes.  We don’t want to know.

Could go on, but no one likes a long blog.  If you’ve read this far, cheers.