15 days to go

With the departure date creeping ever closer, and my panic attacks coming thick and fast, I thought now would be a good time to begin blogging my travelling adventures.

I’ve never done one of these before. It seems a bit strange to want to publish your every thought to the internet...I think for the most part though it will be a good way to keep people at home up to date with what’s happening when I’m on the other side of the world, and I suppose it might even be a bit cathartic. God only knows I need a bit of catharticism at the moment,

I've been suffering from panic attacks for a while now, you see. Ever since my Nan died, grief has seemed to manifest itself in the form of a chronic fear of death, and the conviction that I am in fact going to keel over at any moment. In the past few weeks it’s got to the point of actually being uite ridiculous, ad t’s seriously disrupting my life. I'm not sure if it's all these crazy vaccinations I've been having, or the prospect of leaving Matt, but I can barely get through a day without a spate of tasting-my-own-heartbeat and lying in a trembling wreck. Maybe that's part of the reason that I ended up in A&E today. Maybe the blogging will help.

After spending a week or so trying to decide whether or not to turn down an unliscenced vaccine against Japanese Encephalitis I ended up going for it. I was told that there is a small chance of allergic reaction, even going into anaphylactic shock, but I decided the paranoia that I might have actually contracted the disease whilst travelling would be worse than the paranoia about all of that, so I tried to put the worries out of my anxiety riddled mind. However, after spending a week sweaty palmed and paranoid, I finally gave in this afternoon. My tongue was swollen and I was wheezing hard. I called the travel clinic. Travel clinic said, “Get to A&E!”

Not the best message to put to a pale and trembling wreck of a woman, so I called up the slowest taxi ever and puffing and wheezing made my way to the hospital. A million mixed messages later I'm sat at home munching antihistamines and wondering whether all of this was such a good idea after all.

The nurse said it looked like my throat was up from a viral infection. The travel clinic people who I visited next said it was up because I was allergic to the vaccine. I still don't know who was right, but the travel clinic people said to wait out the next 3 days with extreme caution and to call an ambulance if it gets any worse. On top of that they are now refusing to give me any more vaccinations because the vaccinations pose more of a risk to me than the actual diseases. Lovely! So, now I've wasted all my money on these expensive courses of injections I'm not even able to finish. AND I have a fat tongue.

Still, two weeks to go!