A Sydney sojourn

I’m finally home again, after two weeks in Sydney – a slightly longer than expected stay. The visit started well on the Monday, with an afternoon at my publisher – final edits for the book, planning for the launch, and a great interview with Graeme Blundell from The Australian, which was much more an interesting conversation than an interview.

The surgery to stent the cerebral aneurism went ahead on the Wednesday. The brain part of it went fine, but in this type of procedure they access the aneurism by going up through the artery from the groin, and unfortunately at some point towards the end of the procedure, I had a major bleed into my abdomen. Not fun! As a result, I ended up spending 5 nights in hospital instead of the expected 2, and had to have a follow-up procedure a couple of days after I was discharged, necessitating another 11 hours in hospital.

I’m experiencing some pain from the haematoma, which isn’t too bad if I’m moving around gently, but gets pretty bad if I try to lie down for hours at a time – hence the whole sleep-thing is somewhat disturbed at present. I’m assured, though, that the pain will decrease as the haematoma is gradually reabsorbed into the body. Now that I’m home, I can switch between the bed and the recliner chair as necessary for comfort, so I got some reasonable sleep last night.

On the bright side, my Mum came up to Sydney for a couple of days after the DH went home, and we enjoyed having some time together. When Mum had to go back to Canberra, my 17yo niece came up, and we had a lovely long weekend indulging in retail and cuisine therapy! She’s in her final year of high school, and we found a lovely dress for her to wear to her formal later in the year, which her parents approved the purchase of. I wanted to get her something pretty as a ‘thank you’ for helping me out and keeping me company, and we found a gorgeous black taffeta skirt and a nicely tailored top that went with it. Then she found a wonderful pair of purple ballet flats that were on super special, and so we added those to the outfit, along with an inexpensive purple stole.

I wasn’t quite up to going out to see a show on Saturday night, but on Sunday night we decided to dress up (I have a new long blue jacket), and we went out to dinner at the Summit restaurant, a revolving restaurant on th 47th floor of one of Sydney’s office towers, with great views over the city including the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. We thoroughly enjoyed the food and the evening, and it was wonderful to be able to make pleasant memories of the Sydney trip to balance out the medical dramas.

Now I’m home, planning to take it easy for the next week or two, while working on my next book, and doing the final preparations for the workshop Valerie Parv and I are running in San Francisco at the end of the month.

I’m really looking forward to all the excitement of the next couple of months – the San Francisco conference, the workshop for the New England Writers Centre, the book launch and the RWAustralia conference in Melbourne, and the event that’s being planned with the local Dymocks bookshop here in Armidale in early September. Life is, on the whole, pretty darn good right now!