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Canberra Today 15°/18° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Letters / Home and off to hospital

LAST MONTH we returned from a three-week trip to Myanmar.

quillI’m 54 and Myanmar has been a closed country for pretty much all my life. It’s been slowly opening up since the elections in 2011 and we wanted to visit before it turned into a commercial blend of Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

Three days after we got back to Canberra I developed a fever. I’ve had the flu and the like before but nothing like this.

The timing suggested I might have picked something up on the return trip so I phoned the number on the travel advisory they give you at immigration for ebola. The nurse I spoke with quickly figured out I didn’t have that, but with my temperature tipping 40C she put me on to 000 who dispatched an ambulance and 15 minutes later, early in the morning, I was delivered to the emergency department by two paramedics.

All day they checked me while figuring out what it was I had, working  through a range of weird symptoms. The tests came back and it turned out I’d picked up a new strain of flu (I’d had the most recent vaccine) and pretty soon I was in the infectious diseases ward being regularly visited by anonymous gloved, masked and gowned nurses and doctors.

It took two days to get the temperature down, the blood pressure up and the headaches under control before I was discharged and on my way home for a couple of days of bed rest and antivirals.

Spending a day in an emergency department was a real eye opener; watching patients come and go, watching medical teams form and disband, watching shift hand-overs and file reviews. All in all it looked like a slick operation.

I really wanted to say thank you to all the paramedics, emergency department and infectious diseases ward staff who looked after me. I feel much better now, and just a little bit guilty I didn’t have something really serious. But, if ever that does happen, I am confident I’ll be in good hands. Thank you all.

Steve Dunn, Weston

Let’s get on with governing

I don’t support this government’s policies; I support government-by-popularity-polls even less.

The media feeding frenzy is just as ugly now as it was during the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd debacle.

So, how ’bout we all grow up and let the Government focus on doing what we’re paying them to do – govern?  And demand real “news” from our media, instead of the rumours and innuendos we’re getting now.


Judy Bamberger, O’Connor

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Ian Meikle, editor

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