Another Thing That Can Kill In Australia...

Have you read Bill Bryson's "In A Sunburned Country"?! No? Ok, well let me bring you up to speed. The entire first chapter is about things in Australia that can kill you. Not only are there the top 10 most deadly snakes in the world here, but Oz also has killer jellyfish, spiders, and various other not-so-dealy-but-still-highly-venomous-and-will-put-you-in-a-world-of-hurt-type animals, like the anomolous and cute playpus. So even if their wildlife look cuddly, its really best to stay the hell away.

Lovely. Anyway. So after the 24 hour marathon of flying (Washington to LA to Sydney to Melbourne), KK and I have arrived in the promised land. Fast forward through a few nights of partying and drinking. Day of Matt's birthday dawns and KK is not feeling well, fluey to be exact. So she's loaded up with drugs and vitamin C kindly provided by Matt's mum who conveniently happens to have been a nurse and like, the best caretaker ever, and she's feeling better by New Year's Eve. We're all drinking like its 2008 and then manage to miss the countdown, and suddenly we have to start partying like its 2009 with a vengeance. I believe there was a spa involved. And more drinking.

And then, the next morning, we all wake up feeling like death, slightly warmed over. So, not only has KK relapsed into her sickness, but somehow the rest of the us have managed to contract it as well. And it has mutated into a knock-down, drag-out, migrating menace. One day we're all coughing like the devil's playing soccer in our lungs, the next we're so weak we can barely hold our life-giving tea cups and dripping enough snot to fill the pool outside. Grossed out yet? Yeah, multiply that times, I don't know, forever, and that's how we feel.

Yesterday Matt's parents tried taking us for a drive up to Arthur's Seat, just to get us out of the living room that we have comandeered as the infirmary, and we were completely prepared for every sickness contingency in that car. We had pillows, a blanket, a box of tissues, all of our various kinds of drugs, vitamin water, apples, the works. We ended up pretty much needing everything we had brought, and we stopped for more drugs on the way home.

I really shudder to think how horrible we would all be feeling if Matt's parents weren't taking such good care of us. Paul and Lydia have fed us every possible food, liquid, and pill that would make us feel better. I'm pretty sure that have deprived a small Third World country of its vegetable supply to make sure we are getting 500% of our nutritional daily intake requirement. And I've had more tea in the past 72 hours than I've ever seen on a grocery store shelf, not exagerrating there.

Right, so to summarize, we were sick, we are now (fingers crossed) on the mend, KK is actually almost back to normal, Matt's parents deserve a Congressional Medal of Honor, and we might be let out of the quarantine zone in the next week! Then we just have to worry about the sharks, spiders, snakes, and other lovely things that are waiting to attack us out here. By the way, if anyone has a lung to donate, mine have abandoned me in my endless quest to cough up my ankles.