Fringe

The problems of living so far away from home have never been as manifest as now.  My father was rushed to hospital on Monday night after getting increasingly short of breath.  My sisters tried to contact me as soon as they could but suddenly realised that they never had my Australian mobile phone number and so ended up leaving a message for Barnadi and I on facebook, in the hope one of us would be bound to check it.  So Tuesday morning when I was at work I got a text message from Barnadi telling me what had happened.  By the time I got home from work it would have been the early hours of the morning for those back in England so I had to wait for a more reasonable hour before I could attempt to contact my sisters to find out what was going on.  After what felt like forever I eventually got to hear what happened.  My father had been away for the weekend, with his active retirement group and had been feeling rough and not been able to sleep the whole trip.  By the time he got home he was unable to speak without getting short of breath and so my half-sister took him straight to hospital.  After ruling out another heart attack they diagnosed him as having fluid on the lung which they treated with aggressive diuretic therapy and used artificial ventilation to keep his oxygen sats up in the meantime.  This seems to have got him back under control and his obs all started to stabilise.  He is still far from out of the woods and he will have angioplasty and a stent put in before he goes home.  This whole episode seems to have been precipitated by events from a few weeks ago when my father was getting dizzy spells.  The GP feared his blood pressure was getting too low and so reduced some of his medication including his diuretics, we now think that it was this reduction in the diuretics which allowed an excess of fluid to build up slowly in his lungs to the point where he needed hospitalisation to fix it.

While feeling so far a way from family back home in the UK, having friends from the UK over here in Australia has made life seem more interesting again.  This week I took Gemma and Dan up to our friends house in St Andrews so that they could see their first wild kangaroos.  As well as kangaroos we also saw an abundance of cockatoos, galahs and even a kookaburra.  Dan however seemed more interested in poking every rotten log or tree looking for spiders. 



Cockatoo

The Melbourne fringe festival is currently on, and we used this as a chance to catch up with Sam and Athina who we hadn't seen since we had them around for dinner soon after they first arrived.  Barnadi was working so Gemma, Dan and myself went into the city and had dinner at the Ludlow on the Southbank where they have 'steak night' every Monday and Tuesday.  A porterhouse steak with a glass of wine or pot of beer for just $20.  It was a very good steak, and very good value for money considering the usual prices for going out here.  We were a little worried at first that we were going to be late for the show, but luckily we made it to the fringe hub with enough time for a beer with Sam and Athina before the show started.  Sam and Athina have made a lot of progress since we last saw them, they both now have their registration sorted with AHPRA (a much simpler process than I had with them), and are currently looking for jobs.  Sam and Athina had picked the show they wanted to see "As we mean to go on", a drama performed by a group called Elbow Room which won several awards after last years festival.  It was billed as being a new look at creation theories, but in reality it turned out to be a retelling of the book of genesis.  The show was performed in the middle of the audience which was small, and arranged in a square around the stage.  The acting was good, but a little too religious for my liking.  The funniest thing however was when Dan asked me just before the show started, "do you think there will be any nudity", to which I answered "No, as the brochure would put a warning if there is nudity in the show".  The lights suddenly come on to the first scene....Adam and Eve.

Sam and Athina went to watch another show after the first one but Dan, Gemma and myself thought one was enough and had one last drink in the fringe club while watching some dodgy free cabaret before deciding to head home.