April 18, 2016
All at sea: 18th-22nd April
The next couple of days were inevitably long and difficult. Dea spent most of her time lying in bed, and every hour I administered eye drops or creams into her eye. After hearing we were still on board the boat and unable to get to a corneal specialist, the doctor from American Samoa advised our doctor on board to prescribe anti-viral and anti-fungal treatments alongside the antibiotics already being taken. Nobody knew what this thing was, so it seemed the strategy was simply to attack from all possible angles. It sounded logical, but the number of different potions going in Dea's poor little eye only appeared to be making it look more bloodshot and unhealthy, and the spot certainly wasn't getting any smaller.
It pained me so much to see the girl that I loved going through this ordeal. It seemed so intensely unfair. This cruise was supposed to be our reward for our hard work in Australia and I knew Dea had been looking forward to it so much. Now this boat had turned into nothing more than a floating prison. I did what I could – for example bringing food down from the buffet so that she wouldn't have to leave the room – but I felt woefully useless.
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We started to talk about our options for Hawaii. In another unfortunate twist we were arriving on the weekend, and the medical centre told us that they were unable to book an appointment with a corneal specialist. They did manage to get an appointment with what might be the next best thing, however, and told us we would be visiting an eye doctor by the name of Dr. Chee. With the expenses from this whole ordeal already in the hundreds of dollars, 75 cents a minute for wifi no longer seemed that bad, and so we googled Dr. Chee. Although he didn't specialise in corneal treatment it was at least listed among his many apparent areas of expertise within the field of ophthalmology. We hoped he might well have seen something like Dea's condition before, at the very least, given that he was 79 years old, with a total of 54 years experience.
Although Dr. Chee's experience was considerable I was concerned that he might be past his best, and we were both concerned about the cost of American medical treatment. We discussed more about what was likely to happen. Clearly this was not something that was going to go away quickly, and Dea was probably going to need long-term treatment and monitoring. Corneal replacement surgery had also been mentioned. In all probability she was going to have to fly out of Hawaii, either to Vancouver, or home to Denmark. The question was, would I be going with her? By now Dea had calmed down, no longer distraught from the immediacy of an unsympathetic doctor talking of unnecessary over-zealous worst case scenarios, and she, understanding the importance of my trip to me, said she would probably be okay to go alone. If, for example, she flew to Vancouver, she would be able to stay with my friend Gabi, who I knew would look after her, until I arrived five days later. If she were to fly back to Denmark, she would be surrounded by friends and family who would of course take the very best care of her. She might then be better in a month, and fly back to Vancouver, by which time I might have a new passport and a chance to continue our journey exactly as planned. I wasn't entirely sure. I wanted to be by Dea's side throughout this. Would my bicycle journey even mean anything any more if I wasn't?
As the week went on Dea began to feel better and ventured out of the room from time to time. One evening we went up to watch the sunset, and on another we celebrated crossing the equator, although we stopped short of popping open the sparkling wine that we had decided to save for the occasion. Dea even managed a few games of table tennis. However, despite these moments, it was never long before she had to retire back to bed. Every morning I checked Dea's eye hoping to see some improvement, but the white spot never changed. On the other hand, at least it didn't appear to be getting any worse. Finally, having watched about fifteen movies and concluded that George Clooney really isn't much of an actor, the five sea days were eventually over and we reached Hawaii, ready to face our fate, and placing it confidently in the hands of a 79-year-old Chinese man.
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