Zara, oh Zara where are you? It would have been lovely to have had a friendly face to greet us in London.
Lyn had a bad night with quite a bad cold and developed acute Asthma. She struggled through the night and in the morning we went to the local pharmacy which is a section of a very large supermarket nearby called ASDA. A bit like a mega Coles.
With difficulty breathing Lyn asked the Pharmacist if she could supply medication to assist in her breathing. The pharmacist said that in the UK Ventolin puffers can only be provided with a Doctor's prescription (unlike Australia) and having noted Lyn's distress said she was calling an ambulance. We protested to no avail and within minutes an ambulance arrived and applied all sorts medical procedures and tests including the inhalation of some magic chemical which helped immensely to improve her condition. This treatment continued after being put in the ambulance.
This caused the management of the ASDA store much grief as it was not a good look having one of their customers attended to and then taken away in an ambulance in the store. Mick assured them that it was not ASDA's fault and not to worry about filling all the forms in! After stabilising her they took us both to the King George hospital in London. It is the first time Lyn had been in an Ambulance and the last time Mick was in an ambulance was when he came off his motorbike when he was 16.
At the hospital she was given tests including blood tests, chest x-ray and an ECG as they were worried that she may have a clot somewhere following many hours of high altitude flying. This proved not to be the case fortunately and the diagnosis was a severe chest infection for which she was prescribed antibiotics and for the Asthma she was prescribed Prednisolone. She was there for approximately 3 hours which in Mick's experience of the NHS when he lived in the UK, was quite exceptional. There was no mention of us having to pay for the treatment. Maybe we'll have a bill waiting for us when we get back to Australia.
Anyway we thanked everyone for their professionalism and kindness to foreign travelers and caught the bus back to the hotel with a slight detour (Mick's idea) to Barking to get our mobile phones, Internet and travel passes for the week sorted.
We went to the Barking railway station to buy a travel card with photo ID which cost £55 for 7 days. Mick had researched this before we left Australia and found that it offered 2 for 1 entry to several hundred venues and he had created passport photos in Australia for use on the cards. Since Lyn already had an Oyster card, which is a universal travel pass which can be recharged at any time, we recharged that for £55 which also offers 7 days travel across the whole spectrum of London transport.
We decided to go with the O2 network again for our communications but found that the free calls to Australia had been discontinued and replaced with calls to Australia costing 2p per minute. The local UK call rate is 36p per minute which is extortionate, We got 2 SIM cards with sequential numbers (useful) and a WiFi 3g dongle for our Internet allowing 2gb per month of data which when registering was doubled to 4gb. We loaded our 2 mobile phone accounts with £15 each. The total cost for our 2 SIMS with £15 each worth of calls expiring in 30 days and the USB modem with 4gb data per month was £55.74. Data left over at then end of the month carries over if the account is recharged before the month expires.
It was quite cold day today so we wore our thick coats which Lyn was very glad that she had packed.
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