Now it’s Sunday morning, 5:30 AM, in Ravenshoe, Far North Queensland. Yesterday was a long day.
I started out with some grocery shopping for myself and a bit of breakfast and then I tackled the phone problem. I went to the Telstra store in Atherton and discover that yes, it’s Telstra’s fault. In some pique of misguided technology policy (for which Australia is notorious), they basically reconfigured their national cell network in such a way that MOST international phones don’t work correctly. Including mine. So those of us visiting the country “roaming” with our own counties’ mobile providers are screwed. If you have a brand-new iPhone or Samsung you might sneak by, but anything older than a year or two isn’t going to succeed. I don’t really get what they’ve done, something in how 3G vs 4G network traffic is routed, but I was in the position of a) buy a new phone and try my luck with switching my US sim card into it, or b) buying a local pre-paid phone with a new phone number.
Option “a” terrified me – I’ve had such horrendous experiences with switching sim cards to new phones even within the US that I decided not to risk. If anything goes wrong, I’ve lost my AT&T service completely, until I can get AT&T customer service (excuse me, what is this?) to help me fix it. So bought an Australian prepaid phone. If anyone wants or needs my Australian phone number, I’m happy to share. The phone itself, being a bottom-of-the-line cheapo, isn’t “portable” and worse than my current Motorola. My intention is to just leave it here when I leave, and I, or someone else visiting, can pick it up and hopefully get some use out of it on future visits.
This whole process was mind-numbingly slow. The Telstra shop was too busy for the level of staff it had, and their way of coping was to prioritize those clients who had previous appointments. Which I didn’t have. So helping me out was squeezed between 5 or so other clients, in spare moments. I was in the shop for almost 2 hours.
I had flashbacks to my first month in Korea, when I’d gone there to teach, in September, 2007. I was sitting in a phone store there, while they plodded through the bureaucracy of getting a new work-visa-holder (me) a new mobile phone. It was a lot of bureaucracy, and possibly the staff wasn’t terribly competent. Danny, my new boss (the principal at the first school where I taught – a contract that only lasted about half a year since he sold his school and my contract had to be re-done under the new employers) was watching me as I sat with him in the shop, waiting for them to get my phone set up. I vividly remember, he remarked, “You are weirdly patient” (his English was native, he’d grown up partly in the US).
I asked him what he meant by that. He explained that most of the foreign teachers he’d worked with wouldn’t have been so patient. I shrugged and said something wise (by accident, I’m sure) – I don’t remember what it was. He nodded and said that maybe I would work out as a teacher in Korea, after all. I remember at the time mostly being focused on the subtext: that he’d had doubts about me working out as a teacher in Korea. But looking back, it feels vaguely prophetic, given I lasted in the country for 11 years.
Okay, that was a digression. TLDR: I was sitting in the Telstra shop in Atherton for a long, long time. Then I got my new phone, and I started actually succeeding in communicating with people. I was helped very much by one of my mom’s doctors, who on her own time texted out my new number to all kinds of useful people and offices. So I’m grateful to “Dr Anj [Angela]”.
I learned that my mom was just starting her MRI down in Cairns. The weekend staff doctor (Mikaela) at Atherton Hospital was available to meet and I had a great talk with her, including getting a full list of my mom’s medications, their indications, various concerns, and expressing my worries about contravening my mom’s wishes in the event they wanted to do any kind of surgery on her hip.
In the end, the doctor was supportive of the idea that I drive directly down to Cairns Hospital and present myself to the doctors there and discuss with them the whole situation. So despite it being a 2 1/2 hour drive, I did that, and reached Cairns at around 2 PM – just in time to meet one of the residents at the “Transit Lounge” – an area for outpatient procedures at the Cairns Hospital, which is a behemoth of an institution, given it serves not just the City of Cairns (pop ~200,000) but the vast outlying regions of all of Far North Queensland (a region the size of Wyoming, with about the same population).
The doctor, and her supervising doctor, affirmed that they were declaring that the break in mom’s femur did NOT require surgery. “You’ve dodged an operation,” joked Dr Ahmed, with a smile. My mom became alarmed, because she’d forgotten there was an operation in need of dodging. So we calmed her down and said everything would be okay.
Then there was another bout of interminable waiting, while the powers-that-are turned the gears to get Ann transported back “up the hill” to Atherton Hospital. Ann several times forgot she was in Cairns, which probably is for the best, as she is opposed to the concept of Cairns as matter of deeply-held philosophical principle, and is unable to say the name of the city without venom. I’m not sure I understand the antipathy. She’s just not a city person, I think it what it comes down to.
So I waited with her, and made stupid jokes and observations, and let her look over my shoulder as I studied Duolingo’s Vietnamese, Korean, and Welsh on my phone. She mostly stayed in good spirits though she became quite angry when she announced she needed to pee, and the nurses all insisted that it was fine to pee into the “pad” (adult diaper). It’s undignified, I understand, but as a practical matter there is no way the thinly-stretched hospital staff can spend half an hour transporting a non-ambulatory patient to a restroom on demand. Ann was very grumpy about it. I tried to say she should look at it as a kind weird luxury – a “pampered” existence and all that. It’s a difficult thing. I remember similar struggles during my days in the ICU in 2013 in the wake of my tumor removal.
Once she was loaded into the ambulance, left too and drove back up the hill and to my mom’s house, just over 3 hours drive time on the twisty roads of the Kuranda road and the Tablelands. I got to the house at just after 9 pm. It had been very long day, mostly driving and waiting.
Today, being Sunday, there should be fewer obligations. I’ll go into Atherton and visit at the hospital, and hopefully meet up with a few of my mom’s long-suffering, supportive friends.
It was rainy and thunderstormy last night, but the dawn is cool and blue-skied, and wallabies are grazing around my mom’s driveway, and birds are making alarming jungle-noises in the trees.
