Dwti Draig

In a previous blog post I wrote about letting go of perfect. This week has been even harder, as I’ve had to learn to let go of control, and this is something I am definitely not very good at!

By now we should be in Sweden. Instead, I am sitting on the sofa in my dressing gown at home, writing this at 6am on a Saturday morning. The reason I am up so early is that I can’t sleep for making lists in my head. We are still Baltic Bound, but the ferry has been moved back twice already. Nevertheless, we are booked in again for mid week and are determined to get on it this time. 

The last week has been a week I would rather not repeat; a week of immense stress and upheaval. It all started the week before when Lyn visited our friends at W.G Davies, our local MAN dealer to have his vehicle inspection check with them, pre-departure. I joked that Lyn was having his YTS apprenticeship with them, and would be sent to look for a left-handed screwdriver. We knew the visit would be invaluable and would show any minor faults we could quickly address before we departed. The inspection did not go to plan as they identified three major issues. The rear brake adjustor needed replacing as this was not working efficiently (and brakes are pretty important on an 18-tonne truck). The gear linkage was severely worn and needed replacing which will stop Lyn from fishing for gears at roundabouts. The icing on the cake, however, was the EGR valve, which had seized and was not operating. This allows the engine to work efficiently (think MPG which is very important to us) and also suppresses all the warning lights on the dashboard as the engine management thinks the engine is not working correctly. The EGR is a common fault on older TGMs like ours, but unfortunately are very costly and difficult to remove and replace as the bolts are often totally corroded. The guys in W.G. Davies took nearly a day to replace it, reverting to having to weld a socket onto a seized bolt head to remove it, (see photo). Some of the bolts sheared and they then had to drill them out. EGR are pesky little beasts! The whole experience was a costly one but needed to be done, and the guys in the depot did their usual magic to take away a lot of stress and help us get on our way safely. Based on their years of experience repairing and working on TGMs they even provided us with a list of spare parts we need to take with us to keep our wheels moving; things like a fuel cap (often damaged when people try to steal your diesel), and a pierberg valve. We now know Dwti is relatively safe with our W. G. Davies medical health check, but we also know she is an old bird that has worked hard and can throw up faults any time, a bit like Lyn really!

At the same time all this was happening we were also having major domestic drama with our youngest son who should have been on the holiday of a lifetime in Peru. Cian had always wanted to hike the Machu Picchu trail and fly over the Nazca Lines, and had decided now was the time to make this dream a reality. It all turned to an unmitigated disaster, starting when he made it to Lima, but his rucksack didn’t. This meant he lost the first two days of his organised tour and had to fly to Arequipa to meet up with his group, meaning he missed his flight over the Nazca Lines. Things could only get better, right? They did, but only for two days. He had fun with the group and posed with pretty llamas, and got to view condors at Colca Canyon, before disaster struck again. He started vomiting an hour into a nine hour overnight bus journey to Cusco. Then other parts of him started explosively exploding too. It was not a good trip, for him or anyone on the bus. He was really unwell. He got to Cusco and saw a doctor who gave him antibiotics. He started to feel a little better, so went to a remote Peruvian village for a homestay, before things turned to shit, literally,  again. 

At this point I had been communicating with an increasingly desperate Cian viaWhatsApp almost continuously, feeling pretty helpless. I then got his travel insurance involved, as he couldn’t contact them. They advised him to get to hospital, back in Cusco. The Peruvian villagers came out in force to help him, in the middle of the night, and he was soon hooked up to an IV drip in hospital, with his dream of the Machu Picchu hike in tatters, and feeling pretty rough. 

The hospital ran some tests on him, and he was diagnosed with gall bladder problems from a salmonella infection, which explains the sickness, diarrhoea and fever. The hospital decided he needed gall bladder surgery! Not the news any of us wanted! They recommended he had the surgery in the UK, so I sprang into action with the insurance company, trying to get authorization to fly him home early. There were so many hoops to jump through. They needed a certificate from the doctor to say he was fit to fly, so we got that. They needed the doctor to say on the discharge notes that it was medically necessary, so we got that box ticked. We started looking at flights home, then we found out that the discharge notes were going to take 3-5 working days to get to the insurers. This looked like a show stopper, but they then decided they could use the fit to fly note instead. We resumed looking at flights, only to be told by the insurers that the gall bladder condition he had been diagnosed with could be chronic rather than acute, so they needed to be sure he had not been treated for it before. This was going to be impossible, as there was no way he was going to be able to speak to his doctor from Peru, and get a form signed quickly. 

It was all very stressful, especially with the time difference of -6 hours meaning that so many conversations and WhatsApp calls had to take place in the early hours. Eventually we made the decision to just get him home and sort the insurance refund afterwards. He booked himself on the first of three flights, from Cusco to Lima, for later that evening, while we looked at the international flights. There is no direct flight from Lima to London, so we decided to hand it over to a Travel Counsellor friend, Paul Sharp. I made a frantic call to Paul at 7.30pm, asking for his help, and within an hour or two Cian was booked onto two business class flights, via Atlanta, leaving that night. The only problem was that if his Cusco flight was delayed, he might miss his next non-refundable expensive flight! Knowing the way Cian’s luck had been lately, he decided to jump straight in an Uber and head for the airport to try and get on an earlier flight. Luckily that proved to be a sensible choice, and he got to Lima earlier. His original flight was delayed, which meant he would have missed his international flight. He was soon winging his way home in luxury, which meant we could all take a deep breath and relax, for the first time in a week. His girlfriend Hayley picked him up at Heathrow and he has a doctor’s appointment next week to hopefully arrange surgery. 

The last week has been stressful in so many ways. I feel totally gutted. Cian has missed out on the fantastic trip that he had looked forward to so much. He spent so much money on it, and it will take a long time to save up to do anything like it again. The week has also taught me to try and look for any positives, although I did have to dig deep. The hospital in Cusco looked after him really well. He was in a bed in his own room with an IV drip within half an hour of being admitted. Our NHS is wonderful, but he would have been on a plastic chair waiting for goodness knows how long here. I am also immensely grateful that I had the time to sort it all out for him, and that I was not having to juggle work or life on the road at the same time. It has also given us more much-needed time to sort things out on the truck before we leave, as we still have a never-ending jobs list, although the end is almost in sight now. It has proved that life is rarely perfect or without its challenges. The skill is in trying to navigate it and how we react. I must remember that the answer to my problems is not in the fridge, although it may be found in a gin glass! If we can stay sane, (even if it does need the help of gin), then we can consider that a win to be celebrated! Hopefully the next blog post will be from further afield… stay tuned!