The disasterous London weekend

When we found out we weren’t getting the apartment we wanted (see http://www.zoeselina.com/?p=174), we decided to book a weekend shopping trip to London to cheer ourselves up. We booked for the first weekend in August, which would mean when we got back it was only two weeks until our summer vacation in Turkey. How was I to know it would be a cursed weekend from hell!

About a week before we were due to leave for London, I started to get a sore throat. It got very bad very fast, so in order to get over it before our trip, I worked from home for a couple of days and then took the last couple of days of that week off, hoping that rest would cure me in time, or at least get me well enough to enjoy the trip. Hah! No such luck.

By Friday when we were due to leave, I felt like my throat had completely closed over and had developed a cough as well. I didn’t feel too wretched, just tired, but I was worried that with all the swine-flu panic in the UK maybe I would get stopped at customs.  I also had the added worry that although I had the letter saying my Norwegian visa renewal application was pending, I didn’t have the actual stamp in my passport yet. I got a new passport last time I was in Australia too, so I had to take along my expired passport with my expired visa in it. All very confusing for the immigration authorities.

Luckily there was no incident getting into London and we managed to get from the airport to our hotel without too much drama. It was pretty late by then though, and I was wiped out and feeling pretty crappy.

Next morning I awoke feeling quite a bit worse, so the first thing we did was to find a Boots and buy the best over-the-counter cold and flu drugs we could get our hands on. I have to tip my hat to Boots, their in-house cold and flu drugs are a MIRACLE. I never could have gotten through the day without them. They also gave me some cough suppressant lozenges which saved me from many an embarrassing coughing fit on the tube.

We met with friends for lunch and another friend for dinner, and by then I had completely lost my voice. Usually I like losing my voice, it’s kind of fun to sound like a lounge singer, but between having a throat so sore it made me cry to swallow and feeling dozy from the drugs, it wasn’t much fun at all.

The friend we met for dinner was an old friend of Chris’s from Australia, so they had a big night out on the town planned. I was quite happy to return to the hotel and sleep… only I couldn’t. When a drunken Chris stumbled in at around 5am, I was sitting up in bed trying not to cough, burst into tears or kill myself. Some time during the night I had also contracted some kind of eye infection which quickly spread to the other eye, making them both pink and gooey. By morning I had also burst blood vessels in both eyes from coughing too hard.

We met other friends from Australia for a late lunch on the Sunday, by which time both my eyes were seeping with yellow stuff and bright, zombie red:

Try removing the red eye from that photo!

I had to wear sunglasses the entire day so that people wouldn’t vomit at the sight of me. I had even less voice than the day before and could pretty much only whisper. Suffice to say I didn’t feel like shopping that day. All I had wanted was to go to Debenhams and stock up my winter wardrobe, but we got in there, I took one look around, felt completely overwhelmed and we walked straight out again. At least Chris managed to pick up some things for himself.

By the time we made it back to the hotel and got our bags, time was getting a bit tight. We got on the tube only to find that several stations were out of service that day and we had to take the ridiculously long way around. To save time, we decided to get a cab to Victoria station instead, which is where the train to Gatwick leaves from.

Traffic was terrible and we only made the train that would get us there exactly on time to check in… or so we thought. When we got to the check in desk the very unfriendly man behind the counter told us that check in had closed five minutes before, and we should go to the customer service desk to make other arrangements. Of course, this was the last flight to Oslo of the evening for Norwegian Airlines, so we knew we were stuck.

The customer service desk was overcrowded with other irate travellers and we had no chance to talk to someone before our flight took off. In the end we talked to the very lovely people at the missedyourflight.com desk, who booked us a room at the airport Hilton and got us a new flight for the following morning. All at a price, of course: 8000NOK! (That’s about £800 or $1600 Australian!) And of course because we’d missed the flight and it was technically our fault, we had no coverage from our travel insurance. To my distress, I burst into tears in the customer service desk which is normally embarrassing enough, but when it makes your eye-pus flow down your cheeks it is nothing short of devastating.

So I called our lovely cat-sitter and asked him if he could stop by again in the morning to feed the poor kitties. He kindly agreed to stay another night so they wouldn’t be alone, which was a huge load off my mind.

The Hilton was nice enough, but through my haze of sickness I just didn’t care. I spent most of the night in the bath tub trying not to wake Chris up with my constant gagging and coughing. By the time we made it home at around midday Monday, it was too late for me to make a doctor’s appointment and I had to wait until Tuesday.

When I finally got to the doctor, he told me I had a bacterial infection in my lungs, a viral infection in my throat, conjunctivitis in both eyes and a burst blood vessel in my left eye. Lovely. He was very quick to stress that it was NOT swine flu, but that I should get myself to bed and stay there until Sunday. I was only too happy to comply.

My entire illness phase lasted more than 8 weeks, but that leads into my next post… our trip to Turkey. Coming soon!

PS I did get some good news on re-entering Norway: they checked on the computer and my visa had been approved, so I just had to go get it stamped in my passport. Yay!