Australia Day + you have WHAT now?
This week started off just like any other, working, eating, sleeping….plus there was that awesome public holiday on Thursday otherwise known as AUSTRALIA DAY!
It was a bit strange for Dan and I this year, being so far away from our friends and family in Queensland, away from the packed beaches and surrounded by the smell of BBQ’s.
Dan and I have been wanting to check out the East side of Melbourne for ages now, and Australia Day presented an awesome opportunity for it. It has been really good having our friend Debbie to show us around Melbourne, and she is the reason we fell so in love with Melbourne in the first place, her Magical Mystery tours of Melbourne are awesome.She took us on one such tour on Australia Day, all the way down the east coast of Melbourne. We stopped at Halfmoon Bay Beach for a swim, I got pooped on by a seagull…
…had possibly the most delicious fish and chips in my life at The Bridge Fish & Chip shop in Mordialloc (I recommend it!).
Then we made it all the way down to Mornington, where we found an Australia Day Parade. I haven’t been to one in years and it was so much fun. There was a Scottish bagpipes band playing Waltzing Matilda which I thought was pretty awesome…
a really cool convoy of cars…
…marching bands, crazy weird rubbish fairies, fire engines spraying water everywhere…
This next one is my favourite shot of the day, the spirit of Australia right there! I was a second too early to get her taking it though.
Slip Slop Slap! We love our beaches!
Thanks to Debbie for driving us around everywhere, we really appreciate it!
Dan was a bit sneaky this year and decided to take the Friday off and have a long weekend, to try and catch up on some of his other work, but I had to go to work 
He woke up on Friday morning with a sore belly, and couldn’t have gone to work anyway, but the pain he was describing was really unusual. What he was describing to me sounded like period pain, which is a pretty weird thing for a guy to have!
I got home that day and it was still there and hadn’t eased at all, despite taking pain killers throughout the day. On Saturday morning when he woke up it was still there, and both of us were getting a little concerned at this point. I called the Nurse Hotline in Victoria, and asked for the names of some GP Clinics in Melbourne open on a weekend, but I couldn’t get in anywhere and so we took a little road trip to the Emergency Department at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.
We had to wait the usual two hours to be seen, but the doctor who came and got us was lovely, took some bloods had a bit of a poke around in his belly and said it could be …..appendicitis. For those of you who don’t know Dan, he’s probably the healthiest person I’ve ever met and it’s the most bizarre thing I can ever think of him having!
He had to have a second lot of bloods taken because the first lot clotted (I didn’t even know they did that!) and then he was finally admitted as a patient.
We ended up spending ten hours in Emergency before getting a surgeon to come down and put their two cents in, he confused all the doctors because he wasn’t showing any of the other symptoms (nausea, loss of appetite, vomiting etc). All he had was the pain in the right spot.
They kept him overnight for observations, and then they decided in the morning it likely was appendicitis and they were going to take it out. It’s called Appendisectomy in Australia, and is keyhole surgery, but I can tell you, spending my whole weekend at hospital and watching him get wheeled away for surgery (no matter how minor) was definitely not what I expected to be doing!!
Getting wheeled away for surgery, still smiling 
He was such a good sport about it though, he didn’t complain once. I generally don’t deal well with medical/hospital stuff, but he was smiling and laughing and joking around and I would not have dealt with it half as well if he had been truly sick. He is so amazing and was such a good sport about it all!
Just out of surgery, awake and already mucking around and smiling!
He had the surgery on Sunday afternoon, and it went completely fine thankfully, he was eating not even two hours afterwards. They even released him on Monday morning, not even 24 hours afterwards!
It’s been such a surreal couple of days. He’s here, sitting next to me on the couch resting and it is hard to believe that only two days ago he was in hospital recovering from surgery (no matter how minor!).
It’s made me so thankful that it was nothing serious and that he is generally a healthy person. It could have been so much worse, and I’m just glad that he is better and safely resting at home. I don’t even want to think about the alternative!
