Sydney foray

It's been a long silence since my last post. The flight to Sydney went OK and we were met at the airport by Miang's Uncle Andy, his daughter Lily and her husband, Anthony. The three of them live up in Curl Curl on the North Beaches about 30 minutes drive north of Sydney. After my two days at St George hospital in Botany Bay, they looked after us for a couple of days before our return home last night. The picture shows me and Andy on Palm Beach, at the tip of the Barrenjoey headland. Spending time with Andy and his family was a welcome break after very intense medical consultations and tests at St George Hospital.

Andy is a retired chemical engineer with extensive business experience in the petrochemical industry, and is a wise man. We had much to talk about including quantum mechanics and global climate change! He is also very generous, in the Lim family tradition, giving me and Miang a wonderful tour of the North Beaches region in his beautiful new Mercedes, as well as treating us to one of the top local restaurants for lunch. And Lily and Anthony were the best of cousins, driving us back from the airport and hosting us for two lovely meals in their home.

The "Sydney option" is something I have been considering for a couple of months now. My Wellington surgeon referred me to the team of Professor David Morris of the University of New South Wales. David Morris is world-renowned for his radical peritoneal cancer surgery, carried out at St George Hospital, using a method developed by Paul Sugarbaker in Washington DC. I won't write more about the option at this stage. The details are a bit overwhelming anyway. The purpose of my visit was assessment, them of me, and of course me of them. Once they have reported back to my Wellington surgeon, and I have had the chance to consult with him, I will make a final decision.

Meantime, I had some good news from my Insurance company. On the basis of my written appeal to them, they have decided to make an "ex gratia payment as a one off, the reason being that the information given to you at pre-approval was insufficient"

Naturally I am grateful to Tower and have accepted their offer.



PS: I have always been fascinated by the existence of a suburb in Sydney called Curl Curl. To those of us who were brought up on vector calculus, curl curl is the gradient of the divergence of a vector minus its Laplacian. When I first saw a Sydney ferry named "Curl Curl" back in the 1980's I was amazed at how mathematically literate Australians must be. Since then I have discovered that Curl Curl was derived from the Aboriginal phrase curial curial, meaning river of life.