February 7

It's been a while since I've written, so I'll do a little catch-up about what we've been up to the past three weeks. The biggest news was Dave having to go to the hospital. He had a bowl obstruction, well actually, his bowel twisted. This is the third time in about 15 years that this has happened. This time when it happened he was able to self-diagnose and we were able to get on top of it early on. Our emergency room experience was not my favorite part of the whole thing. I told Ashley I don't know how she does it, the emergency room is a crazy place. The hospital we ended up at was huge and the ER was huge also. They had two giant ER rooms with about 30 'rooms' (curtained off areas) per ER room. Needless to say, Australian ER rooms do not allow for privacy. The guy next to us wasn't breathing, at least very often, so there was quite a ruckus going on next door trying to get him to wake up and keep breathing. I think there were drugs involved trying to get him going, but mostly a lot of yelling. The woman on the other side also appeared to be on her way out of this life. I'm not sure what the deal was with her, but she looked very bad. The worst thing that happened to Dave in the ER was them putting a tube up his nose and down through his stomach. The idea behind this is to relieve the pressure build-up from the bowel being twisted and the intestines being unable to do their job. This condition causes a lot of pain and bloating. By putting the tube down and relieving the pressure, the hope is that the bowel will untwist and that the intestines will begin to work properly. I was on the phone talking to our Blue Shield insurance in the US during all nose tube procedure, so I was a little disconnected, but I did notice it took 4 people to complete this procedure. It also took 3 people to put in his IV. The hospital we were at, WestMead, is a public hospital (they have levels of hospitals here) and is a teaching hospital, so EVERY procedure involved several people, only one of whom seemed to actually know how to do the procedure. Of course, the one who knew how to do the procedure was NOT the person who was doing the procedure, they were just coaching. The person doing the procedure was a person who, apparently, had never done the procedure before... ever. For example, the girl putting in the IV needle got it into the vein ok (Dave has nice big veins), but then for some unknown reason, she thought it might be better if she shoved the needle in a little farther. This resulted in the needle going all the way through his vein and out the other side. A lot of blood was involved. When I turned around and saw his arm I was shocked at the amount of blood there was all over his whole arm. I guess they got the needle in the right place eventually because it finally stopped bleeding. I've had IVs put in before that resulted in no blood being spilled, so I'm pretty sure his bloody arm was a result of an inexperienced nurse. After they had Dave hooked up with all the needles and tubes required, they gave him some morphine and it worked wonders. He had to go up for x-rays and a CT scan and then they put him in a room. Again, Australian hospitals are different from anything I've ever seen in the US. They have wards here that have 4 people to a room, but the strange thing to me was that they have men and women in the same room together, sharing the same bathroom, and the same lack of privacy. Dave's room had 3 men and one woman. The first woman got released during the time he was there and she was replaced with another woman. It seemed very odd to me that they mix grown men and women in the same room together. I guess if you want more privacy you have to go to a Private hospital as opposed to the public hospital we were at. We weren't picky, we went to the hospital that was covered on our insurance! The first 24 hours Dave didn't get any food at all, once they decided his bowels had unkinked, he graduated to jello and juice and the next day to soup and pudding. He was very happy on the third day when they took out his nose tube. By then they decided he was ok to go home. Again, he didn't have his own doctor assigned to him, a team of doctors was assigned to him (most of the team were medical students I think, one was a resident). When it was decided he was healthy enough to go home, they just came in and told him he could go, no wheelchair out to the curb like in the US, I guess they figure if you're well enough to go home you'd better be able to navigate out on your own steam! Pretty crazy.

Last week we had the most exciting event happen that we've had since we got here. We had a visitor from the US, even better, it was our son! Luckily, Dave's hospital adventure happened when it did, because he was home and healed pretty much by the time Ben arrived. For those of you who don't know, our oldest son, Ben, works for Exxon Mobile. His assignment now is managing several project managers in various parts of the world. His particular assignment puts him over projects in Iraq (handled mostly from Dubai), Jakarta, Indonesia, and somewhere in Canada-- I can't remember the name. Anyway, Ben got a quick weekend trip over to see us last weekend. He'd been in Dubai for a week and in Jakarta the next week and he fit a quick trip to Sydney in over the weekend. Needless to say, we were very excited to see someone from home! It was a quick trip, he finished work on Friday in Jakarta and got on a plane and flew all night and landed in Sydney at 7:30 a.m. (3:30 a.m. for his body). We picked him up from the airport and then headed to downtown Sydney. We met up with Sandy and Ross Tolman, friends of Ben and Whitney's from Houston. They are serving as missionaries in the office of the Sydney South mission, so they met up with us for breakfast and spent a fair amount of the day hanging out with us.
We rode the ferry to Manly Beach and walked the beachhead for a bit and then headed downtown to the outside market. We spent a little time in the Barrack's Museum and walking through Hyde Park. We made a quick trip home after lunch so Ben could shower and unpack and then headed back downtown for more ferry rides to a restaurant we'd heard of that supposedly had the best fish and chips in Sydney. They were actually quite good, so I guess it was worth the extra effort. We rode the ferry back in the dark and got to enjoy the city lights and moon and stars. Sadly, my little camera just doesn't do night time shots well, so no pictures of that:( Sunday we walked the grounds of the Service Center where we work and he got to tour our office. We ended our walk at the temple. We went to church, but left early to get him to the airport on time. It was a crazy, short visit but we loved every minute. Ben's towel is hanging on the back of our bathroom door and I still haven't taken it down; having it there makes it seem like a little bit of him is still here:)

Manly beach

Lunch at a German restaurant, complete with a polka band!

Fish and chips under the stars.

Our favorite Italian bakery.

Tough choices!

Sad to say good-by.

This weekend we spent part of the day working in the office. The weather was dreary, rainy and cloudy, but then by noon it started to clear up so we decided to head off on a short adventure downtown. It's good to get away from the office on the weekends! I Googled 'free things to do in Sydney' and chose a short 2k walk that was rated the #8 best thing to do in Sydney. We found our way down to the ferry area where the walk began and then spent an hour or so walking the 2k path to Mosman Bay. The sun came out (it actually got pretty hot) so our walk was beautiful. Actually, it's hard to find anything in Australia that is ugly, although we've never been to the outback, I guess it's pretty ugly, but the edges of Australia, the parts that boarder the ocean, I can testify, there's nothing but beauty there!

After following the shoreline for a while, the walk then follows along below the beautiful homes on the bay.

This house was my favorite. It's big enough to be a hotel.

This is where their front yard ends up!

Apparently, even though this house is located right on the ocean, you can see the beach and little bit of the water, these people thought a pool was necessary.

I don't know what this is, but it fell out of the tree right next to where we were walking. I'm glad it didn't hit us on the head. It's hard to tell here, but this thing was almost the size of a basketball and is heavy and hard.

I think it is trees with beautiful flowers like this that are making my allergies go crazy!

I don't know why my husband didn't think of this catchy name for his office!

The spiders in Australia are huge!

All along the first part of the walk, while we were in the 'forest' part, there were hundreds of spiders. Besides the big one in the center, all the little spots are spiders too, not spots in the sky! Apparently, these spiders spent all night working building giant webs crisscrossing through the trees. One thing you learn really quick down here, in the summer you NEVER just walk along anywhere without looking in front and above you, there are millions of spiders here and they build webs from place to place that make you wonder how they ever could create a web that big. It's not uncommon for spider webs to be 4 or 5 feet across. I have no idea how those spiders can jump far enough  (or know there is something over there that far away they can catch on to) to get their web built. This web was about 5 or 6 feet across. I think all the little spiders wait until the big guys get a good size web going, then they slither across and find a good spot to hook on and build their own web.