All roads lead to lupus

"I feel perpetually tired, and I think perhaps my left hand is a little swollen compared to the right?"

"Me too!  I looked it up and found out I've got Lymphogranuloma Venereum; I've got all the symptoms"...

Ah, the wonders of self-diagnosis.  Anyone who's spent a good amount of time looking up their various ailments on Web MD will be no stranger to the notion that every symptom eventually leads to a conclusion of some type of cancer.  In fact, if you really try, you could progress yourself from a picture of health to a diabolical cot-case with one click of the mouse.

I work a full-time job with a 3 hour daily commute.  On weekends, I spend my spare time jumping out of a small plane and for six hours a week I learn French.  As a result of this, I am tired.  Quite tired, a lot of the time.  Occasionally I combine that tiredness with a slight headache, a mild nausea, a few aches and pains or a stiff neck.  While undoubtedly the result of long hours, a body-intensive hobby, too much tea or not enough water, I have been drawn more than once to the enticing world of online diagnosis.  The process of deciphering one's condition progresses as follows:

Step one:  Log in to the unreliable medical website of your choice.  (These are, without exception, money-grabbing and inaccurate sources of scaremongering).  For those without a good internet connection, Doctor Oz or a similar television-based medium can be substituted.

Step two:  Add your symptoms to the website search engine.  The more vague the symptoms, the larger the range of diseases you'll have access to.  Good examples of symptoms to use are:
tiredness
joint pain
abdominal bloating/cramping
headache
nausea
diarrhoea

These are present in at least 97.831% of all possible diseases, so adding these in any order can lead to a fun game of "Guess the illness".  Invariably, the choice will be between 5 autoimmune diseases and 15 types of cancer.  Lupus will ALWAYS be one of them.

Step three:  Click 'Search'.  

The results will be displayed as a list of potential conditions.  I particularly like WebMD, which provides a schematic diagram of a human body and some extremely descriptive symptoms (for example:  Vomit the colour of coffee grounds... urgh).  

Step four:  Call your boss.  Someone as sick as you should definitely not be going to work tomorrow.  I'm surprised that someone with Wegener's Granulomatosus can even function enough to operate the computer.

The only rule of self-diagnosis is simple:  At no point during the disease determination should you ever consult a medical professional.  However, you may seek guidance from any number of professions proclaiming to treat or cure with absolutely no scientific credibility.  These include:

Astrologists
Priests
Kinesiologists
Exorcists
Tarot readers
Shamen
Faith Healers

*Please note, the above list is not exhaustive and any other self-proclaimed (but not accredited) medicinal occupation can be added. 

I've worked for the past few years in a job that deals a lot with autoimmune disease.  As a result, I have developed a deep-seated paranoia about lupus and scleroderma.  As the temperature cools, I see a blue tinge to my nail beds and immediately diagnose myself with Raynaud's Syndrome.  If I have a nuclear-hot shower and turn my stomach a fetching shade of fire truck, I have been known to talk myself into all kinds of rashes and complaints.  I've calmed my own nerves after I've convinced myself that I have kidney failure, melanoma, brain tumours, hepatitis, menangitis and many broken bones.  

Through my work and my physically demanding free time, I know first-hand just how unreliable self-diagnosis can be, and how devastating it can be in the wrong hands.  Alexander Pope wrote that "a little learning is a dangerous thing"; and these words have never been truer than with the example of a paranoid person with an internet connection.  So please, if you're feeling under the weather and you're not surrounded by empty beer cans, please consult your GP before you turn to the internet!


*Please note:  I do not want any reader to assume that I take the diagnoses of serious disease lightly.  I am very aware of the severity of many conditions (including cancers), and the above is intended to be read as light-hearted satire.

Under no conditions do I advocate the services of any untrained medical treatment (unless under strict supervision of a qualified medical professional), so please, if you think there's something wrong, head to the doctor :)


Blue skies,

Ez

Isn't it a lovely day...

I've lived in some pretty miserable climates.  Growing up in the sulphurous climes of Rotorua, I spent moved south at 18 for four years, toughing it out in a variety of insulation-free student accommodation in Dunedin while at university.  Dunedin is a gorgeous little town with a heap of charm and God knows I love it, but my goodness can it rain.  Many a wintery morning was spent scurrying with head bent, hands shoved into pockets, shoes sloshing and cursing the weather as I headed to class ten minutes late.  On a bad day, student life in 'Dunners' is cold, wet, miserable and stressful.  On a good day, it is a beautiful south island town full of friendly people and one of the best places in the world to get drunk.  It will always be home for me and my heart lifts every time the turbo-prop judders to a stop outside gate 8 of the 'International' Airport.

With a full-body moon tan and a couple of thousand pounds in my pocket, I spent the last year of my degree in Dunedin's spiritual homeland, Scotland.  I was warned about three things before leaving for Glasgow; terrorists (I was there not long after a failed attack on the Glasgow International Airport), getting stabbed, and the weather.  Only one of those things turned out to be warranted - I thought Dunedin was a damp place to live but Scotland gets the gold medal.  Glasgow is a brilliant city with heaps of character, locals who are friendly almost to a fault, and about a foot of rain a week.  Everybody in Scotland gets drunk.  All the time.  And having lived there, I can't blame them at all.  Pubs are warm, dry, companionable and full of cheap beer.  As the old saying goes, 'if you can't beat 'em...'

With a freshly-minted degree and the liver of a sour-faced geriatric, I returned from the northern hemisphere and headed to Australia to dry out.  Knowing almost nothing about any Australian cities, I picked the destination with the cheapest airfare from New Zealand and landed in Melbourne.  If you'd asked me about the climate of Australia, I would have told you that it is above 30 degrees Celsius for 300 days a year, with a couple of months of patchy cloud in the middle of the year.  Not so.  Melbourne gets a handful of extremely hot days in summer, and six seasons in any one day for the rest of the year.  Oh, except for winter.  Winter it rains.  When I first arrived in Melbourne, the city was experiencing a severe drought.  After five years of almost continuous rain, this was the best news I could hear.  During my residence there, precipitations gradually increased to the point where I forgot the sky could have a colour other than grey.

And so we come to my current location; Westlock, in Alberta, Canada.  Advertised as Canada's sunshine state, Alberta is a province of endless fields, oil sands and the Rocky Mountains.  Westlock is the gateway to the first two of these.  When we arrived at Edmonton Skydive in March, the entire area was 3 feet deep in snow.  By late April, the snow had all but given way to a foot of mud, and by mid-May the mud had dried to a dust bowl full of mosquitoes.  I hadn't seen rain in nearly 3 months until last night, when the heavens opened and the dusty road turned to slush.  Today, we were treated to the most severe thunderstorm I have ever seen, with a torrential downpour that showed us where all the leaks in our house are (duct tape is a wonderful invention).  The plane is sitting folornly on the tarmac, the bookings for all tandem skydives have been postponed, and the dropzone staff are huddled in the hangar waiting until the first case of beer can be cracked.

It is a universal human characteristic to have some kind of preoccupation with the weather.    As a skydiver, we spend more time than most with our heads back and eyes fixed to the sky, searching for gaps in the clouds and the speed of the wind, but we are not alone.  People of my grandparents' generation will shoot the breeze (so to speak) about the weather until your eyes glaze over and they fall asleep at the table, but even they don't hold a candle to the windswept residents of Alberta.

The climate of Edmonton and the surrounding area leaves a lot to be desired.  From October to March, the entire region is blanketed in snow.  Going outside with any extremities exposed is a hypothermia risk, anything of a botanical nature is long-dead and unless you drive a minimum of a large 4x4, you're not driving any further than the end of your driveway.  

March to May, the snow gradually subsides and patches of grass peek through.  Areas of poor drainage become bogs, and mosquitoes the size of F-16s ensure that you are always wearing an uncomfortably warm amount of clothing.  The temperature jumps 25 degrees in a week, and suddenly it feels like summer.  Once the bogs have evaporated, clouds of dust swirl in the wind and keep the car washes in business.  Two days ago I scrubbed my SUV until it sparkled, only to cover it in dust and dead bugs by the time I drove the 6 kilometres home.

June to September, Edmontonions keep all their fingers and toes crossed that the weather holds long enough to get crops sown and harvested, livestock born and raised, gardens planted and admired, and a few camping trips to the mountains.  Statistically, there is not a month of the year that has not snowed at some point, so it is not hard to see the motivation.   Living in the area, I too find myself talking about the weather forecast with workmates, friends, and fellow skydivers, monitoring weather apps and checking radars with monotonous regularity.  The beginning of May, we experienced our last* snowfall of the 2013 winter season.  Behind dark glasses, I don't think I was the only one to consider shedding a few frustrated tears as the flakes landed and settled on our doorstep.  Driving to work in a blizzard, I ended up trapped in the city by a complete freeway white-out.  Welcome to springtime in Alberta!

I had to ask myself why I am so drawn to live in cities with terrible climates?  Why don't I get an incredible compulsion to live in the Bahamas or the south of Spain?  Part of it I know is my line of work, but I think that predominantly it is because I have met and bonded with some of the most delightful people and communities in the places that I have lived that I am not put off by the thought of half a year of snow/rain/mud/slush/insects.  I am quite content to tolerate the fact that the first ten minutes of every work day will be occupied by talk of the terrible weekend weather or what my plans are for the tiny window of summer conditions that are forecast for the next three days.  One of Adam's favourite sayings is "the place to be is where you are".  It has never been more true.  I love my life, rainstorms and all.  

*don't speak too loudly, there is still a chance it could happen again!

2013 - The year to live the dream

Welcome!  
To the extremely overdue first post for 2013.  The reason for the delay was partly due to a number of sizeable decisions that had to be made, partly due to an overabundance of assignments and work projects, partly due to a few overseas holidays we just *had* to go on, and mostly due to the prophecies of a whole packet of past-the-sell-by-date Safeway fortune cookies.

2012 for Adam and I was the Year of the Long Distance Relationship.  Contrary to popular belief, absence does not make the heart grow fonder.  In fact, I can personally attest to the fact that absence makes for a lovely airport reunion, followed by a week of loathing of your beloved's domestic idiosyncrasies, followed by a week of guilt for not enjoying the aforementioned time together, followed by a tearful airport farewell before you repeat the process.  Not to mention the lack of bedroom shenanigans during the 'away' spells.  Oh, and working full-time during that time doesn't make it any easier either.  We spent important milestones with a 4,000 km distance between us: birthdays, Valentine's Day, anniversaries, they fall into the wayside as we focused on financial goals.

Crowds of immigrants of all nationalities (ok, New Zealanders and Irish) have been flocking to the Australian mine sites in search of the ever-elusive pot of gold (see what I did there?).  Adam is an Australian, one of the few working as a scaffolder in North-West Western Australia and hating every moment of it.  I was tied to Melbourne by a job I enjoyed but with a lack of construction work in Victoria and a lack of any other type of work in Western Australia, our relationship was punctuated by Skype calls, the occasional text message and a lot of frustration.

Over the customary box of fortune cookies we had some joint realisations:
1. We're getting close to the international cut-off for working holiday visas.
2. Our inflated mining-subsidised income was not improving our quality of life.
3.  Something had to change.

So something did change.  We resigned, ended our lease, packed up our life and threw/gave away/sold everything we owned minus skydiving and climbing gear, and a couple of changes of clothes.  The presence of a sister company in Edmonton willing to give me a job decided our fate:  we were off to Canada!

Adam was out of Australia in January 2013.  Keen to join the ranks of those who jump off inanimate objects, he attended a first BASE course in Twin Falls, Idaho.  Two weeks of repeatedly jumping off a 500-foot bridge ensued.  With winter temperatures seldom above 0 degrees C, he got a quick education in outdoor apparel, sub-zero hiking and outdoor parachute packing.

With a few jumps under his belt, he graduated to the red-rock cliffs of Moab, Utah.  Alarms every day at 6.00 am began the jump-fest that ensued.  By the time I joined him in Salt Lake City in mid February, he had over 50 jumps.

As the plane readied to land in Utah, I looked out of the window and thought to myself, "wow, that salt lake really is pretty expansive".  A second glance made me realise the 'salt' was in fact snow.  It was cold outside.  Minus 10, to be exact.  Coming from a balmy 36-degree day in Melbourne the day before, I was ridiculously under-dressed.  Our hotel was double-glazed with a hot tub in the reception area.  

The next morning it had snowed.  Still was, actually.  Our GPS couldn't find our hotel, the city centre, or anything else we entered into it (Magellin brand, for the love of peace, NEVER buy one!).  We walked the streets of Salt Lake City, bought a lot of winter clothing, some crampons, and two bowls of hot soup.  In the three days we were in Salt Lake, we drove at least 150 km further than we needed to - thanks once again to the incompetence of the GPS.  Fed up, we headed north to Twin Falls.

Idaho is the potato capital of the USA, according to the locals.  The restaurant salad bar provides gratis potato soup, and the name of the foodstuff must at all times be barked out as "poTAtos!"  We met a couple of other BASE-jumpers at the Perrine Bridge in Twin Falls,  and despite a couple of high-wind days, Adam managed to get a few lobs from the railing.  Hiking to the landing area was a perilous process, involving a lot of slipping a sliding down sheer ice.  Reward in the form of frozen waterfalls paid dividends.

After a few days watching the wind flag flap and bend in the wind, we made the decision to head south again, taking advantage on the way of the world-class ski resort at Brighton, 25 miles from Salt Lake City.  We scored a mid-week deal at a crack den lodge offering a mid-week special including lift tickets, and that had the added bonus of being 20 metres from the chair lift.  More snow than either of us had ever experienced provided two pain-filled but fantastic days of flinging ourselves down the slopes in a variety of ways.  Night skiing is a whole new way to find icicles hanging from your nostrils, the temperature plummeted to nearly 20 below and every part of us was numb.  What better condition to attempt our first-ever time on skis!  Snowboarding had kicked our butts in every way possible, so we traded the comparatively comfy snowboard boots for the clunky and immovable ski version.  Within seconds of tightening the clips we had toe cramps, calf pain and an inability to walk.  This, we found, is a mandatory part of skiing.

Ski school is for sissies.  With great effort we clicked ourselves in, and headed for the kiddy lift.  Full of self-congratulation while we were seated, this quickly turned to apprehension when the slight slope at the end of the lift appeared in view.  Disembarking could have been a myriad of skis, poles, limbs and swearing, but we both adopted the 'snow plow' face, planted feet and prayed.  Five metres of ungraceful skidding later, we were still standing and ready to tackle a very mild slope.

Ten minutes later, we were rock-stars.  "This isn't even that hard!", "I'm so fast, I don't even need the pizza stance!", "Let's go on a blue run!"  We did.  We fell over and got back up (that is a challenge on skis!).  We didn't break any legs, and when the lifts closed we collapsed into pizza bliss, bruised and battered and content.

We were done with Salt Lake City, and Moab was calling.  We spent two blissful weeks in Moab, which is paradise on Earth for any mortal in favour of the outdoors.  Hiking, BASE-jumping, abseiling, skydiving, slacklining, climbing, mountain-biking, kayaking, it's all being done there.  If the USA would be so kind to impart Green Cards upon us, we could both happily live in Moab.  It is so unlike the rest of Utah - it is open-minded, organic, hip, culturally aware and a hive of adventure.  After watching hours of video footage of other people having fun in Moab, it was fantastic to finally be experiencing it.  We met such amazing people, and that place will be etched on our souls forever.

An aerial photograph of Moab, taken during a skydive.  What a landscape, what a place

Our route south took us to Zion National Park, where we hiked impressive cliffs and slept in our rented Hyundai Santa Fe to save money.  Bolted climbs are in place so we took a rope and found out that cold rock cracks can cause hand cramps.  We were too tight-assed to pay the ludicrous camping fees, so for 3 days we washed in the freshly-melted Colorado river inside the park.  I'm sure there are a number of Asian tourists who are showing the photos of this to their families as I write this.  The temperature of that water was barely above freezing, so to save the brain-freeze I had to bend double to dunk my hair into the river.  I shudder to think what their photos must look like!

In the Grand Canyon, we struck gold.  A friend of a friend is the park electrician, and he was happy to have a couple of house-guests.  His house also had a shower, which we embraced with gusto.  Amazing to be clean again!  We hiked down the Canyon, ate lunch surrounded by squirrels, and hiked back out again.  We got up on sub-zero mornings to watch the sun rise over the expansive canyon, and caught a bus west to watch the sunset from a famous lookout.  The Grand Canyon is hard to explain, and even harder to capture in photographs.  It's the epitomy of three-dimensional landscape.

From Arizona, we drove west to Las Vegas.  Weeks of outdoor purity had not prepared us for the batshit-crazy onslaught of Sin City, and we explored the Strip in wonder at the amount of lights and gambling and general debauchery.  In our time there, we lost exactly $3USD with our wild ways.  The amount we started with was an astounding $3USD - beginner's luck is a fallacy!  We met some hard-core beer enthusiasts from Minnesota who gave us tickets for a free mechanical bull-ride.  Adam proved to us that Australians, like cowgirls, prefer a ride that lasts longer than 8 seconds - he fought to stay on the thing for close to a minute and was cheered from the ring by at least 300 drunk Americans.

Our GPS had the last laugh in the USA, nearly causing us to miss our flight to Canada when it failed to direct us to the return address of our rental car company.  We left with plenty of time to spare, only to be guided to suburban nothingness.  A tow-truck driver kindly directed us to the airport car rental building, only to find that our company was in a separate location.  We rang the company, only to be given a very vague description of the location and told it was on the side of a major freeway.  Finally, we found it by chance and our relief was palpable.

Landing in Edmonton, the runway was white.  The paddocks were white, the buildings were white and the people wore many layers.  I arrived perfectly prepared for this scenario with only the clothes I was wearing on the plane, thanks to a bungle by Air Canada.

Day two we bought a car.  In Canada, a car is a minimum of a V6 SUV.  Ours cost $2,000, bargain!  A mandatory vehicle inspection cost us a further $100, and the required repairs were a further $2,000...bargain??!  Two return trips to a Calgary mechanic later, it sounds like a normal truck, drives like a normal truck and is big enough for us to sleep in it when we go camping in the summer.  It is also the first vehicle we have ever owned with a sun roof!  Plus it's red...

Day five we moved to Adam's new workplace, the Edmonton Skydive Centre, in Westlock - an hour's drive from Edmonton.  Offered accommodation in a series of dwellings/caravans affectionately named the "Ghetto", we lost no time in renting the largest room in a well-heated demountable with a full kitchen, lounge and three bedrooms but minus running water.  The front steps were a broken leg waiting to happen; 10 cm covered in slick ice.  The driveway is further covered by at least 30 inches of snow/ice/mud and the skydiving landing area is in the same boat - welcome to springtime in Alberta!

Day six we cleaned up our dwelling.  Amongst other things we found:  a collection of toenails, a bag of last year's rubbish, a chicken bone in the lounge carpet, at least 45c worth of pennies, a bucket of rat bait including a collection of skeletons of the victims, and two electric bug swatters.  Two bottles of bleach and a tank full of water later, we have de-scunged, vacuumed, scrubbed and removed the above offending items.  Our kitchen boasts a chandelier that Adam has polished to showroom standards (a little ironic when the water pipes are frozen and unusable!), but the best part of our accommodation is the furnace that keeps the temperature a steady 23 degrees C.  The one night the furnace went out, we woke up to the sight of our breath, lino floors that numbed the feet instantly, icicles on the insides of the windows, and a very short breakfast - our subsequent appreciation for the furnace cannot be compared!  I'm personally looking forward to May, the time in which our tap water will apparently start flowing - the sensation of using an outdoor toilet covered in 2 cm of fresh powder is hard to explain...

So in the last four months, we have effectively given up our previous life, our significant incomes, everything we owned, our friends, family and inner-city lifestyle and taken a chance on a small-town, dirt road, freezing cold dropzone on the other side of the world.  We clean our teeth outside in sub-zero temperatures, we spend our days rolling around a pack-mat with two large German Shepherds, we do our grocery shopping in gumboots and taking a shower is a once-every-few-days luxury.  Do we have regrets?  Not one.  Already we have friends and companions and the formation of a fun-filled life.  Our savings account has suffered but every penny spent has been worth it.  I am still able to work in the science field but Adam is finally chasing the career he has been talking about for five years.  We both miss the people from our life back home but have taken this very crucial step to enrich our lives and relationship overall.  We are back to the real world and this is just the first chapter of our plans.

Money is not worth sacrificing your life for, buy a packet of fortune cookies and do what makes you happy before it's too late.


Blue skies,


E xx