It's been a minute

Hello everybody.

It’s been a minute.

Actually, it’s been a lot of minutes.

It’s been way more minutes than I anticipated.

About seven weeks ago, I left you with an update on my back.

Everything was good for my holiday and I was in a really good place.

Everything was positive.

So where have I been?

Where have I been for the last seven weeks?

The good news is I did make it to Southampton.

I did make it on my cruise ship and I did make it on holiday, which was incredible.

Long story short, my back did survive.

Everything’s all good and I’m still fine today.

So that is somewhat of a silver lining.

So bear that in mind with the rest of this story.

This was my third trip back to Norway and the Norwegian fields.

It absolutely didn’t disappoint.

Previously when I’ve been, it’s been later in the year, sort of June, July, August time.

And it’s been, although mixed in Norway, it’s been pretty warm, pretty decent weather.

Going at the end of April, early May, we were anticipating it to be pretty chilly.

And we saw that from the snow-capped mountains in pretty much every place we stopped.

You could see some snow somewhere.

That being said, the weather was much, much warmer than we had expected it to be.

We completely packed the wrong clothes.

We went for winter, snow, having to go outside in jumpers, jackets, et cetera, even waterproof.

Apart from the first few days, the weather was absolutely glorious, much warmer than we’d anticipated.

We absolutely didn’t pack for warm weather.

And that includes sun cream.

Anyone that knows me will realize that even in the UK, I pretty much carry sun cream everywhere I go.

I’m really fair-skinned and I burn very quickly.

But there was me thinking it was gonna be Norway.

It was gonna be snowing.

It was gonna be overcast, even though I know you can get sunburn in snow when it’s overcast.

But I wasn’t anticipating to get sunburn.

I didn’t pack sun cream.

And there were days it was absolutely needed.

The views, the snow-capped mountains were incredible.

It was definitely amazing seeing Norway at a different time of year.

I’d definitely recommend going to Norway or any time of the year, to be fair.

But if you’re gonna go a couple of times, definitely do one early.

I wouldn’t go too early because it can be much, much more snowy.

And then it becomes impractical to move around unless you’d like a challenge.

So this was fine.

There wasn’t any snow on the ground where we were.

Occasionally, there was the odd little bit of a snow shower.

Moving around was absolutely fine, not impacted by the snow.

We were originally due to stop in five places.

The first place, which I can’t pronounce at all, so I’m not even gonna try.

We didn’t actually stop there because the weather was too bad.

That was when we were expecting it to be snowy and a bit rough.

So the first couple of days were a little bit rough at sea.

Essentially, they aborted that docking and took us on a scenic tour down a different fjord to a really nice big waterfall at the end.

And actually, that was really, really nice.

It was unexpected.

It wasn’t on the itinerary.

A scenic cruising day down a fjord, get to this waterfall at the end, which was incredible, by the way.

I will try and put some pictures in this blog or certainly later on.

It made a nice change.

Although disappointing, we didn’t go to where we meant to.

It was definitely a really good substitute.

Outside of that, all of our dockings were fine.

We went to Alisund, Olden, Skolden, Stavanger, and then back home.

Two of those places I’ve been before, it was the reason we booked this cruise because it was going back to Skolden.

We wanted to go back there, a nice little Norwegian village, a really quaint place to visit.

It was on our list of things we wanted to do again.

The cruise itself was incredible.

We went on the Sky Princess.

It was a very similar ship to the Regal Princess that I went on around the UK last year.

It is one deck bigger and about 400 passengers bigger than last time, but we weren’t really anticipating too much difference.

The layout of the ship was a bit different.

They’d opened out some of the social areas a bit more.

It was a little bit more spacious.

All that being said, it actually felt busier on the ship than I’ve ever felt on a cruise before.

I don’t know whether it was just because there was more social passengers on board and they were out and about all the time.

The social areas could be quite full at certain times of the day.

It just felt busy.

On cruise ships before, I’ve never struggled to get a seat or a place in a coffee shop.

I’ve never been wandering around to find somewhere to stop.

It was still great, still really enjoyed it.

A really good ship.

I definitely recommend it as one to go on.

The food, as always, was incredible.

The entertainment was good and the staff were lovely.

As you’re about to find out, I’ve got to know them a little bit better than I ever have before.

The first five days of my cruise were absolutely incredible.

Stopping at Olden on the fifth day may be my new favorite place in Norway and it may actually overtake Skolden.

It was really, really quiet.

A nice little Norwegian place to go.

Really, really beautiful scenery.

The journey to get down the fjord was good as well.

Welcome to the sixth day of my cruise where we were meant to be docking in Skolden and revisiting the place we’d been to before.

I woke up with a bit of a headache, not feeling very well, a little bit lightheaded and just didn’t feel like getting off.

On cruises and holidays, I generally always have one day in the holiday where I’m feeling a little bit rough, a little bit worn out, probably had too much to drink and my body’s just like, I need a break, I’ve got a headache, we need to rest.

And I thought that that was what was happening on this day.

It was just my rest day that my body needed and everything was gonna be fine.

I didn’t get off in Skolden.

The other travelers with me did.

I stayed on the ship.

I essentially went back to bed, went to sleep with a headache and thought nothing of it.

A few hours later, I woke up expecting to be fine.

I still wasn’t fine.

So I had a bit of water and went back to bed and tried to sleep it off.

I don’t normally sleep with my Apple Watch on, but because I’d got up to try and go out and get off the ship, I did have it on and I left it on whilst I was sleeping.

About four hours later, I woke up, still not feeling very well.

I woke up to alerts on my Apple Watch saying we’ve noticed arterial fibrillation in your heartbeat.

So for those that don’t know, arterial fibrillation is essentially an irregular heartbeat.

Your heart beats quickly and not in the right rhythm.

Okay, that’s a bit odd.

Do I trust what my watch is telling me?

You can rerun the ECG manually on most Apple Watches.

I ran it again and it came back with arterial fibrillation.

This is interesting.

I probably should get this checked.

On a cruise ship, you ring 911 to get medical help because it’s American.

So I rang 911.

They advised me to go to the medical center, which I did, arrived, and within about 10 minutes, I probably had the most medical staff around me that I’ve ever seen.

I think at its busiest point, there was probably about 10 different medical people just doing different things to me, sticking ECG pads on me, trying to get IVs into my arms, trying to take some blood, run some tests.

I’d never seen people descend on me so quickly.

Within 10, 15 minutes of me arriving, they’d confirmed the diagnostic of arterial fibrillation as well and that it was worthy of investigation.

There’s a quick aside here I forgot to mention.

By the time I’d made it to the hospital on the cruise ship, we’d actually undocked from Scaldun and we were on our way to Stavanger.

So we were back at sea by this point.

It was about 7 p.m.

in the evening.

So we started sailing about four.

So this was about three hours later, back at sea.

This added a bit of concern to the team.

Obviously, when they’re on a cruise ship, they actually have quite extensive resources available, but they are limited because there’s only a certain amount of people that can assist and intervene if required.

You do notice it adds an air of urgency to what they’re doing.

They were actually quite concerned.

I was in arterial fibrillation.

My heart wasn’t beating properly and they needed to figure out why.

After all the tests they run, the only thing that they could obviously find was I was dehydrated, which, to be fair, was probably my bad.

I probably haven’t been drinking enough water and potentially drinking too much alcohol, but that is what it is.

And we live and we learn, and I definitely have.

They wanted to monitor me.

They kept me in the ship’s hospital for approximately 12 hours.

That 12 hours got us back to Stavanger.

And then I was medically offloaded into Norway, which was an experience.

In that situation, the ship call ahead with everything they’ve done, all the tests they’ve run, all the results they’ve got, details about me and my condition.

They ring ahead to the port authority.

The port authority arrange an ambulance.

That ambulance meets you at the ship and then they take you to hospital in the country that you’re in.

Never ever in my life before been in that kind of situation.

I’ve never had an issue whilst on holiday where you’re going into a different country and you’re going into a different healthcare system.

I basically had to go with it, right?

You have no choice.

We got to Stavanger, three Norwegian paramedics come onto the ship.

They then transfer you from the ship to their ambulance and then onward to the hospital.

I thought, this is a medical scenario.

They’re gonna sneak me out the back so all the passengers don’t see.

But that’s not true.

On a cruise ship, they only have one or two ways off.

They stopped all the passengers disembarking.

The ambulance crew came on, they came to get me.

They stopped them disembarking again and then they take me off.

Really awkward.

So there’s loads of passengers waiting to get off and there’s me being wheeled out on a stretcher.

Hey, I’ll be fine.

Don’t worry, I’ll be back later on.

They put you into the ambulance and then the hospital in Norway actually, thankfully was only about 10 minutes drive from where we had docked.

We got there very, very quickly.

I’m not gonna go into all the detail.

Essentially, Norway did a similar round of testing, blood tests.

I saw a cardiologist and essentially, cutting to the chase here, at some point in all that time, in those 12 to 14 hours, my heart went back into normal rhythm on its own.

So I’d returned to what’s called sinus rhythm by myself.

Norway confirmed that as well.

Their view was, the view of the cardiologist in Norway was generally, if you return to normal rhythm within about 48 hours, they’re not concerned there is any further issue.

That was good news, although kind of frustrating because we don’t really know why.

The problem arose, was the fact that I was technically going to be medically offloaded.

I don’t know all of the detail on this, but I believe there is a regulation in Norway that if you’re medically offloaded from a cruise ship, you’re not allowed back on.

That was a concern, because to begin with, they were gonna say, you’re gonna be left in Norway and have to find your own way home.

Before we left the ship, there was a conversation with a lot of people.

I believe the captain even got involved as well, but I wasn’t privy to that conversation.

They were offloading me to go to an appointment and providing the hospital gave me a fit to sail and or travel note, they would let me back on the ship, providing that I could get back before departure.

So the race was on to get all of that done, to get me through the sign-off process in Norway, to explain to them that I needed this certain letter.

I’m sure they do this all the time, by the way, and then to get back to the ship in time for departure.

The really good news is I made it.

I made it back to the ship.

So I managed to get the rest of that day on board, although very subdued by that point.

The next day was then actually traveling back home to Southampton.

So I only had one day to do, which wasn’t too bad.

Again, pretty chilled.

I wasn’t in any mood to do anything crazy.

So what do I think went wrong?

My view on this is, obviously I’d had a bad back for three months.

My exercise levels were massively reduced on what they’d normally be.

I then went on a holiday for a week and my exercise levels dramatically increased.

According to my watch, they increased by about 400% in the first five days.

I think that’s a factor.

My body was probably like, what are you doing?

And just had a bit of a moment.

Secondly, yes, I probably was dehydrated.

And thirdly, yes, I had been drinking more alcohol than normally would.

But hey, I’m on holiday.

In all honesty, that did ruin it a little bit.

It was disappointing.

I was really looking forward to this holiday because of the back injury.

At the end of the day, I did make it.

I did have a really good first five days and it didn’t completely ruin it at the end.

I got to see what the hospital was like.

I got to experience Norwegian healthcare.

Let’s just stop there and talk about Norwegian healthcare.

Actually, just talk about both bits of healthcare.

The healthcare on the ship was great.

I can’t fault what they did.

As I alluded to earlier, this is an American ship, which means it does fall into the American medical system, which obviously I’m not used to.

I’m used to the NHS where you can walk in and out and you don’t pay anything.

I’m not gonna go into monetary figures on this blog, but the bill on the ship that we had to pay for before I left, because you pay for it upfront, before they let you leave.

On the ship, I was being charged for that healthcare and I knew that was a thing.

I had read about it before, that they would charge you upfront and then you claim it back for your insurance later on.

I’d already started thinking about that in my head.

The bill that arrived at the end was a significant amount of money.

It was way more than I’d expected it to be.

That was a bit of a surprise.

That’s a little bit of useful info, actually.

If you can, because I appreciate not everybody can, but if you can, make sure that you’ve got a credit limit available to spend for unforeseen circumstances.

Because like I say, you pay upfront before you leave and then you claim it back later on.

So don’t get caught off guard that that could happen to anybody.

That was the cruise ship medical care.

Like I say, brilliant.

Can’t fault it.

I’m going for the insurance claim still, which is interesting.