Now here’s a suggestion for all you potential travellers: perhaps don’t optimistically schedule your date of departure four weeks after when you hope your operation will be performed, based entirely on the vague assumption of an ill-informed NHS surgeon. This is not the most sensible beginning to the trip of a lifetime.
I’ve been suffering horrible undiagnosed attacks for two years. Having finally been diagnosed with gallstones this spring, I was promised an operation to remove the offending organ “by the end of the summer”. So, big travel plans in mind, I breezily quit my job with two months notice, intending to depart at the end of August and march directly from my desk to the operating table. Gallbladder whipped out, two weeks of recuperation, two further weeks of no-heavy-lifting, then off we’d jolly well go on the first Eurostar out of St Pancras to Brussels and tally ho, hello Moscow, forwards to the Trans-Siberian, and so forth.
