On September 1st, 2004, I had a one-way ticket from Calgary, Alberta, my hometown, to Sydney, Australia. I had a newly-made Australian passport, paid for to be printed expressly, so that I would have it in hand before leaving for the trip. I had thrown a party earlier in the summer and given away 85% of my worldly possessions, an incredibly liberating experience. All I owned could be found in a few cardboard boxes at my parents house and one backpack for my travels. On September 1st, 2004, however, I did not board my flight to Sydney. Instead, for the first time ever, I called my travel agent and cancelled the trip, swallowing a whopping $500 non-refundable portion of my ticket and trying not to cry. I would talk about it with the few people who knew my situation in Calgary and joke about how I had finally learned the importance of buying travel insurance.
A few days earlier, I had gone to the doctor's for a routine yearly check up, including some blood tests at the lab. I went straight from the doctor's office to the lab and got the test done. My ex-boyfrined faints every time he has a needle put into him. Thankfully, I have no such problems. Having been diagnosed with diabetes almost five years ago, it would have been extremely problematic. Every three months I visit the lab and have a few vials of my blood sucked out. The doctor's office called on Monday. That's a bad thing. If you have tests done, it's better if no one calls you about it, it means that everything has gone well. They fit me in on Monday and I spoke to a doctor about the results: low platlet levels. Nothing to worry about, I was told. Normal range is between 150-400 and I was down to 135. Some people live normal lives with only 90. Normally, I would go back for another test in a month to check up on it and otherwise not even think about it. But I was going to Australia. We decided to do another test that day, just to see how things were going, not expecting anything to have changed in such a short time, and I would take a letter from the doctor to Australia with me and get a test done there in a month.
The doctor called Tuesday morning, the day before my flight to Australia. They squeezed me in that afternoon. Platlets at 101. Still not distressing. White blood cell count, however, had halved. Neutrophilis, also halved (these are things in your blood that fight infection.) Now we have a problem. The doctor advises me not to take my flight. She referrs me to the Urgent Internal Medicine clinic at the Foothills Hospital where I can expect to see a specialist by the end of the week. For those unfamiliar with the Canadian medical system, seeing a specialist normally takes several months.
It was too late to call the travel agent that night to cancel the ticket. So, on the morning of September 1st, I made a series of unpleasant phone calls. I lost my $500. I also had to tell my brother, mother and father, waiting for me on the sunny beaches by the Great Barrier Reef in Cairns, Australia, that I would not be joining them, but not to worry, everything would be all right. I emailed my aunt and uncle, prominent doctors at Foothills Hospital.
And I spent the rest of the day completely alone. I told no one about what was happening, so it was assumed that I was in the air on my way to sunnier places. I knew almost no one in Calgary and didn't feel like talking to anyone anyways.
The next day, the Urgent Internal Medicine clinic called and requested that I repeat the blood tests, in case the whole situation was merely a lab error. That made me laugh. Could you imagine cancelling a trip to Australia just because someone was being careless in the lab? The lab results on September 2nd showed no change in the situation. My older brother, having recently completed his canoe trip across Canada, flew from Vancouver to be with me. My uncle took us out for dinner. Having looked over my test results, he explained four or five possible causes of the problem including my immune system attacking my spleen, a virus, and a problem with my bone marrow.
On September 3rd, the lab results reported no change. I spent the morning at the Foothills Hospital getting some blood tests done and seeing a hematologist. She did a comprehensive exam and booked me in for a bone marrow test. By then, she had eliminated a problem with my spleen. There were two options remaining and she diagrammed them for me on the back of one of my lab result forms. Because platlets and white blood cells (and hemoglobin, which was thankfully doing fine in my blood) are all made in the bone marrow, either something, such as a virus, is killing them, or the bone marrow is having problems making them in sufficient quantities. This means acute leukemia or lymphoma. I nodded my head, took a deep breath and said, ok.
My brother was excellent at distracting me from these thoughts. We spent a day raiding Value Village for warm second-hand clothes since I had almost none and watching Harry Potter 3 at the cheap cinema. We went to the Labor Day football game and watched Calgary get pathetically beaten by Edmonton. I got another lab test done on Monday. If the results remained the same or worsened, I would be going in for a bone marrow test on Wednesday, an extremely unpleasant procedure with what could only be extremely unplesant results. We were hoping to catch a virus of some kind.
On Tuesday I saw the hematologist at the hospital again. The results were back from the lab: platlet count back into normal range and white blood cells skyrocketing, definitely indicating the presence of a virus! The bone marrow test was cancelled, I tested positive for mononeucleosis that week and didn't go back to the hospital again!
In the wake of such wonderful good news, it seemed entirely inappropriate to complain about the loss of a mere travelling experience. Besides, more good news followed. I discovered that I was, in fact, covered under my parent's travel insurance plan and have begun the lenghty process of filing a claim, requiring huge quantities of obscure paperwork which will eventually refund me for the entire amount of my lost airplane ticket to Calgary.
And that's the story of how I came to be sitting on my ass, living with my parents in Calgary instead of diving on the Reef in Australia.
Jen
