Quick update

It’s been a long time since my last post. Life got in the way. There are still a few posts left from the Scandinavian trip in the spring. It is fall now and we were supposed to be on another European trip. But this will be a post for the health section. Luckily, we haven’t had serious health issues that merit posting. Until recently.

Today we were supposed to be in Nîmes, France, after touring Prague, Czech Republic, taking a night train to Basel, then TGV to Paris and Nîmes. Instead, I am working on planning our 2026 winter getaway from the cold to Portugal and Spain. About 10 days before our departure, Alex out of nowhere woke up with a swollen, red and very painful leg and foot. During the first visit to the emergency room, he was given an antibiotic and told that yes if it clears in about a week we could travel. I wasn’t quite on the same train. A voice inside, even before this happened, told me that this trip is doomed. Things continued to progress in the wrong direction. In two days on antibiotics things not only were not progressing, but getting worse.

My daughter and I were speculating about flesh eating disease (aka necrotizing fasciitis). The only consolation was that the latter develops in 24 hours and this was day three. Back to emergency. The diagnosis was cellulitis. Treatment. Same antibiotic (not the one favoured by the doctor because Alex is allergic to that one – the only medicine he’s ever reacted to) but intravenous. He was hooked up there for the first dose. Had to be every 8 hours. The hospital organised for home care. He had to go to emerg for a second dose around midnight. But in the morning, someone would deliver the supplies and a nurse would come to set it up. The next morning all happened very smoothly. At 9am the supplies were delivered and at 9:30am a nurse came to set up a battery-powered pump and a bag of antibiotic solution (which all fit into what we call a fanny pack but the brits call a bum bag – fanny referring to a different part of the anatomy there). The pump would deliver the antibiotic at a set 8h interval and a nurse would come daily to check progress and hook up another bag of antibiotic solution.  And he had to keep his leg up, above his heart.

He was mostly in bed. In the meantime, I cancelled the booked accommodations. I am impressed by Nimes’ hosts. This was already paid and none cancellable. However, Booking.com has a feature I didn’t know about until then. Since we were not going, I decided to cancel it courtesy to the host. A screen popped up saying something like (my words here) “Although this is not cancellable things can happen and plans can change. If you’d like to put a short description of the reason for cancellation, we’d send it to the host for their consideration…”

So I did. I said something like, my husband got sick and unfortunately, we could not complete the trip. Perhaps next year. What a surprise it was when I received a message from them stating that they understand the situation, thing could happen, etc. And they released my money back to Booking. If we can go next year, I’ll definitely book with them. Cancellation dates for the rest were not reached yet, so no problem there. With Air Canada we had another problem. We had just cancelled the Aeroplan Visa due to their points system change that wasn’t worth for us. We still have the Aeroplan membership though. We had to provide another way for our ticket refund or use the Aeroplan Wallet to store our money for future use. So we put it in the wallet and I’ve already used if for our winter flight.

It took Alex two weeks on IV antibiotics to recover. He parted with his IV last Saturday and it now out and about. Fingers crossed.