The joys of a couch-lying lifestyle

---

A quick update from Australia! I say quick because my two weeks here so far have consisted of just sleeping, eating and watching TV. I could fill you in on the dramas of Dr Phil and Oprah or the highlights of the Australian Open, but I’m going to presume that the average blog-reader’s life is a little less boring than mine and move right along.

Right along to the end. Here I am, after two weeks, pretty much recovered (thank GOD!) The drama of my little detour to Australia came last week when, after getting better for a week, I then began to get sick again. I was diagnosed with giardia (for all those medically-minded readers) which is another stomach parasite (for the rest of us). It was probably there all along but because the focus was on fixing the dengue fever and salmonella and drug reactions, it was never noticed. I knew I'd had a bad run of things when the doctor laughed to himself as he read over my medical history and then coughed to hide his amusement. Luckily, despite my unhappiness, I had managed to save a single laugh up on the faint hope that one day life might be funny again. I decided to spend it then and we both proceeded to joke about bad luck (to which I will add: I'd managed to reverse a car into a trailer the day beforehand).

After that visit to the doctor, I found myself lying in bed again wondering why my stomach hated me and convincing myself I would never make it back to Thailand. On everyone’s recommendation except the blinded-by-love cupid in my head, I moved my flight to Thailand one week backward.

That’s one week left now for me to fully recover and find a travel bug to infect me once again. Right now Thailand (Nella aside) is definitely not where I want to be. I spent so long feeling so awful there that I’ve managed to program myself to associate Thailand with serious unhappiness and extreme bad health. Logically, I should just go back and overwrite the programming. But I’m glad there’s one more week of Oprahly insights to come before that process begins.

---