Day 20: dash to the dentist

Where we parked that night, east of Melbourne 
and surprisingly rural. No facilities available to us
here, just a space to peacefully park (which cost us
$20).

If you've been following along, you'll know that finding dentists open on the Easter long weekend had been impossible in the areas we’ve been travelling in (rural NSW and Vic), even Canberra seems to lack this kind of service. Melbourne was different, and I found a dentist fairly quickly once we were within driving distance. So this “Easter Monday” (the last day of the four day weekend of holidays) we packed up early and drove over three hours to the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, to get to the dentist before she shut at 1pm.

The dentist was very compassionate and quickly determined that my problem wasn't dental at all. She diagnosed inflammation of the sub-mandibular salivary gland. This gland sits under the jaw bone, about halfway along. This was my third diagnosis in eight days! Would it be the right one? 

Nowa Nowa to Officer to Pakenham

She told me I needed to see a doctor and get some scans done. So that was the next job. We drove to a nearby Hungry Jacks (Australian Burger King) and I had a thickshake for lunch: the easiest thing for me to "eat" as I was still struggling to open my mouth and chew, although it was a little better than a couple of days earlier.

Rainbow just before we left this spot.

Mist on our three hour dash to the dentist

We sat in their car park after lunch and used their WiFi to search for doctors and for radiologists. I accidentally found an after hours bulk bill telephone consult service (non-Aussies, this means I didn't pay for a consultation, it was covered by our compulsory national health insurance). I waited a couple of hours to hear from a doctor, but once I did, she was helpful. Perhaps a little too helpful. She order a CT scan of my neck and an ultrasound. But unfortunately she also led me to believe that I could get the results of those tests from the same telephone service, which had implications in the following days. Thankfully David found a radiology appointment in the area for the next morning.

It was feeling like my health was the third member of this trip and has a far louder voice than either of us, and I wasn't very happy about that.

Then we had to find an alternative place to park the van for the night, because our original planned stopping spot was too far away. Thankfully that wasn’t too hard and so the rest of the day and evening were quiet, very quiet. We were parked at some isolated community hall, with no facilities we could use, just parked there. It rained and blew that night and later we heard that our original plan would have been even worse (exposed spot on the south coast). Thankfully we were in a watertight van where we could be comfortable.

This night we spent some time on a fun project I’m working on. It's a basic scrapbook journal of our journey, in the style of one I did on my first trip to Tasmania when I was 10. It's in a basic school exercise book with a short summary of the day's activity and sticking in any "souvenirs" of the day that we can find. We did a few days of that this night: a non-WiFi activity.