Four months ago, my boyfriend Tom and I moved to Vancouver, Canada. We live with his brother Joe and Joe's girlfriend Kat, and Kat's cat, Sooty. In the flat above live his parents, and in the backyard lives our growing vegetable patch.
When I moved to New Zealand I was 20, brimming with life and ready to do as many adrenaline rushing extreme sports as possible. I broke up with my ex, partied hard, lived in a hostel, moved into a flat, sky dived, went caving, pot holing, jumped off Auckland's Sky Tower, white water rafted, hiked, skinny dipped and generally did as much as I possibly could before I returned home. I made some wonderful friends and often look back at that time with great fondness and laughter; everything was 'Sweet as'.
When I returned home I spent a year wanting to get away again, and despite being in a wonderful relationship, I was angsty and ready to travel again. I hated my job and I felt trapped. So that's when Charli suggested I move to Australia to live with her, her parents and her young twin siblings. I leapt at the opportunity and before I knew it I was living in Mandurah on the West coast of Aus, south of Perth.
This was ultimately a very different experience. I wanted to enjoy my time in Australia, but I was also working full time as a waitress and living with my friends family, and I wanted to save for a big trip. Mandurah was beautiful, and whilst Charli and I had a lot of fun together, I was bored with the work and too anxious to be on the road again. Still, we booked our flights to Nepal, India and Sri Lanka and I was preparing for a short five weeks on Australia's East coast on my own, and then back to England for a few weeks before leaving to do Base Camp Everest and travel with Charli and Sophie to the one place I'd wanted to visit for a long, long time. I was desperate to go somewhere not Westernised.
During this preparation, I decided that I was going to have a Rabies and Cholera vaccination. Despite being very expensive, I was sure it would be worth it. All it would take would be one nip off a rabid dog and that would be that, so I thought I might as well be extra cautious, it wasn't like it would do any harm...
Two weeks after my third and final rabies injection I got Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Nearly two years ago now and I've read a lot to do with immunisations and GBS, with some people getting it after something as small as a flu jab. There is a lot of controversy within this subject, and my Neuro doctors were pretty sure that my immunisations were nothing to do with my GBS. But it leaves the question for future...should I ever get these vaccinations again should I need them? If I were to have kids, would I want them to have the MMR jab etc? Two weeks ago, I was faced with a choice.
I started a new job dog walking. Sounds great right? I get my own van and I basically go out and walk dogs off leash in the morning (six dogs off leash can be pretty crazy!) and private walks in the afternoon. Well, as I was training I had a couple of pretty nervous dogs who were reactive to new people, and one particularly nervous dog was called Baron.
Laura, the girl training me, went in to get Baron a few weeks ago, and by the end of the walk I was holding his leash, giving him treats out of my hand and he was letting me stroke him. When we got back to his apartment, I offered to take off his collar, but alas as I bent down to take it off, Baron freaked out and bit my face and wrist.
It was very sudden and I remember Laura just shouting at Baron and getting me through the door as I began to process what happened and started saying 'He bit me, he just bit me' and I felt the warm blood trickle down my wrist and my face starting to swell. Laura was amazing and had me in the emergency room within ten minutes as she comforted and assured me that my face was okay and it was all fine. I couldn't believe it, there I was back in hospital in another country and of course, I couldn't get hold of Tom or anyone.
After being told that the fee to even just see the doctor was $955 I felt a deep overwhelming sadness for the people of the world not lucky enough to have an NHS or health insurance with their job. What on earth could you do in that situation? Lucky for me I knew that I was covered as this was a work accident, and as Laura left at my insistence, I sat in a hospital waiting room feeling incredibly sorry for myself.
After an hour I was told to sit in a room and wait for a doctor, and as I looked around at all the hospital equipment I had my first panic attack in a long while. Overwhelmed and alone with all the old flashbacks pounding my mind, I started to practise my breathing exercises that I had learnt in therapy. I kept telling myself that I'd learnt to walk again, I could deal with a small dog bite for goodness sake. As I felt myself begin to calm down Tom showed up just in time for the doctor to start injecting the four deep puncture wounds in my wrist, numbing it so he could have a good root around to check nothing was stuck in them. This was incredibly painful but I kept just repeating 'Not as bad as a lumber puncture, not as bad as a lumbar puncture' and then my wrist was completely numb, bandaged up and a black eye began forming around my right cheek. Then I was of course advised I would need a tetanus shot.
I cannot describe the fear of this decision. My doctor assured me that this was not a 'live' vaccination as such, unlike something like the rabies vaccine, but obviously it had to be my choice whether of not to get it. I decided that the chances of this causing a GBS relapse was so slim that I would get the shot, and then consequently spent two weeks worrying about every tingle and every nerve sensation.
But it was fine. Evidence keeps showing me that just because I get the sniffles sometimes, or need a jab, it doesn't mean that I will relapse. This fear ebbs away as each month passes; nearly two years since I heard those words 'We're worried'.
And now I'm in Vancouver. I have blue hair. I walk dogs. I live with my wonderful boyfriend. Of course I've visited the hospital here already, would it be travelling for me if I didn't?!
With all the fear and worry about life that constantly bears down on us, and of all the things we have to deal with each day, it can feel like death and disease is so inevitable and so constantly present.
But in the great words of Jeff Goldblum...'Life, uh uh, finds a way'.
