Doxycycline

When I went for my vaccinations before leaving for this trip, I was given doxycycline as a malaria preventive medication as there was a possibility I would be going to rural areas in risk zones.

A few facts: Malaria is a life-threatening disease caused by Plasmodium parasites transmitted through the bites of infected Anopheles mosquitoes, known as "malaria vectors". These mosquitoes bite between dusk and dawn. Most of the deaths attributed to malaria are among African children. Travelers from malaria-free areas that are not immune to the disease are very vulnerable when they get infected. Malaria is preventable and curable

As travelers, it might be a good idea to sleep with insecticide-treated mosquito nets. I found that in malaria areas, sometimes the nets were provided, sometimes not. You should not take it for granted. Also, insect repellant (bug spray) became my best friend in South East Asia. I don't want to sound all doom and gloom, but let's not forget that mosquitoes transfer other diseases as well, like the West Nile virus and the Dengue Fever (given, it depends on where in the world you are).

To learn more about malaria, like the drug-resistant parasites, click here.

I will be honest with you, I regret taking doxycycline and I eventually did stop it. I know this medication is often prescribed and shows very conclusive results. After all, there is a reason it was prescribed and I fully understand.

The problem was that the side-effects were really getting to me. I would get strong nausea that would last 1 to 2 hours after taking the medication. They would actually prevent me from going out sometimes. The sun sensitivity was also nothing like I had expected when I was first told that this might be a side-effect. I rarely get bad sunburns and when I do, it's because I really wasn't careful. This was something else. Unless I was fully covered I would burn. Sunscreen, no sunscreen, it didn't matter. It was painful and it made my skin look at least 30 years older. Let's be honest, I couldn't really completely cover because of the extreme heat.

(Photo sensitivity: This is what it looks like despite wearing FPS 50 sunscreen)

So yep, there you go, I really regret almost every single dose I took.

Travel Insurance

In this day of age, I can't really understand why anybody would go about traveling without contracting proper travel insurance. I remember this travel horror story of a poor girl who had an accident the day before heading home. She was at a party and the handrail of the second floor balcony gave out. She fell and broke her neck. Due to the critical nature of her injuries, she had to be evacuated by air ambulance to the nearest country that could offer her proper care. She didn't have insurance. She had to pay for all the fees attached to her evacuation and her treatment, which quickly raised up to tens of thousands of dollars.

When I was younger I did not always contract insurance. I didn't think the cost was justified. Now, my position has quite radically changed. I couldn't possibly think of going away without it. Insurance is not that expensive when you weigh it against costs that could result from an accident or a sickness oversea. Granted, it remains an added cost to traveling, which isn't cheap to start with. Yet, in my opinion, it's an essential protection.

For me, it came as a no brainer to get insurance for the coming trip. In fact, it's one of the first details I set in my preparations. I tried to research the subject on the internet, but there really wasn't much information for my specifics. I needed insurance for a multidestination year long trip, for which the destinations were not set in advance. No matter how hard I looked I didn't find anything. Actually, I did find one site which required you to enter all your destinations and dates. For obvious reasons, it wouldn't do for me. It could be that I didn't use the right keywords, but still.

At the advice of a fellow traveler, I ended up calling my credit card provider. They have an insurance branch, so they set me up with the medical insurance I wanted. Normally, I might have wanted to obtain and compare quotes, but without information readily available on the Internet, it wasn't very convenient. Furthermore, I was satisfied with the quote I got from my credit card company, which came to roughly $1200 for the full year. I didn't take baggage insurance, but I am now reconsidering it and might add it to the contract.

Here are the main considerations that were on my mind for insurance coverage :

• Not needing to have preset destinations and time, basically open insurance for up to a year
• Having a coverage of minimum a million dollar (the one I got in the end covers up to 5 millions)
• Having the option of med evac in case no proper care is available on site
• Life insurance
• Coverage for the repatriation of the body in case of death

My question to you, do you automatically contract insurance when you travel. If so, what do you need to have covered by your insurance to feel protected?

Edit : When I realized just how much money I spent on equipment before leaving, I decided to get covered for luggage after all. The first representative of Visa told me they couldn't add luggage covering for this long. I knew it was possible, so I pushed the issue and had them check again. Turns out it was possible when combined to the medical insurance. This is a good example of why it's important to know when to accept a no and when to push an issue. 

So adding the coverage for the luggage also tripled my coverage in other areas and in the end only about $200 was added to my original bill.

Last Day at Work

December 23^rd . My last day of work. Christmas’ Eve is tomorrow, next Tuesday is New Year’s Eve and then 15 days afterward, I will board my plane. Another 30 hours, give or take, will have me landing in Melbourne, Australia.

I will be counting the next few weeks in terms of appointments and milestones as I rush to put together everything I need to leave with peace of mind.

I take a few minutes now to reflect on today as it was a strange day for me. I worked a bit and I packed a bit. Even though I will come back here in a year, I have to vacate my office for now.

Now, if I look over my shoulder I can see three piles which summarize my work life of the last few years. The first box contains things that have made this office mine. Next are two full bins of paper left to be recycled after shredding what seems to be an endless stack of documents. This really made me realize just how much paper clutter had crawled into my life. Finally, the last box contains my ergonomic equipment. This will go into storage until I come back next year.

The last few weeks have been hectic and it didn’t feel like Holidays at work. As I’m writing this, my day is almost over. I will close a few files and send an email to my colleagues. Then, I will log off my computer for the last time this year, grab my box of belongings and head home.

Not long ago I was mentioning how my last meeting with the board had made my traveling plans much more tangible for me. Well today if feel like I’m turning yet another page. I would say half of what I am feeling right now is exhilaration at the freedom ahead of me and the other half is sort of a bitter sweet feeling akin to nostalgia.

I had expected my last day to be similar to when I was back in high school on the last day before summer vacation. Surprisingly, it wasn't. Don't get me wrong, I am excited for sure, but I am starting to see that I have grown comfortable in my routine. I suppose it's a sign that I am slowly heading to another stage of my life. However, I am still thankful for this opportunity to shake things up a little. I'm not quite ready to settle down yet.

Vaccination

Despite believing that vaccines are generally beneficial, I too sometimes have my doubts. Not so much conspiracy theories or whether you can contract the actual disease from the vaccination. Yet, I am sometime weary of unknown side effects of new vaccination. I also often question myself as to whether a particular vaccine is really necessary – this, I ask myself more often considering how afraid I am of those little needles. Best example would be the flu vaccine: since I'm not in the population at risk, I skip this needle very happily. I'd rather handle the flu than its preventive needle.

This being said, with my plans of going through Australia, Indonesia, Asia, India and Eastern Europe, many vaccines were recommended. I found myself weighting the risks of contracting the disease and the effects of said diseases (some of which are just dreadful) against my fear of needles and the price tag attached to the said vaccines. Note : By price tag, I'm referring to both the price of the vaccine itself and the time taken off of work due to the post­vaccination run down added to the actual phobia reactions, which makes every single needle into a traumatic experience...

Considering my phobia of needles, why would I willingly have 8 immunizations, grouped into 4 different vaccines, for a total of 7 injected doses?

 Now, I don’t particularly feel like oversharing my medical history, but I do believe travel vaccination is a topic worth discussing. So I will share with you which vaccine I agreed to take and the justifications for them.


A bit of context: I already had my Hep B vaccination, so this allowed me to have ViVAXIM, the combined vaccine for the Typhoid Fever and Hep A. I also got the Adacel Vaccine, which targets Diphteria, Pertussis, Tetanus and Polio. These two were considered the bare minimum in terms of vaccination. They amounted to two needles and 210 $, which is much lower than the other two vaccines thanks to OHIP coverage. One way or another, as I walked into the office, I was set on having the Tetanus shot. I decided to go with the advice of the nurse and get ViVAXIM as well.

I gave more thought to the other two recommended vaccines: Ixiaro (Japanese Encephalitis) and Imovax (Rabies). So why was I more concerned about them? In all honesty, probably mainly because of the price tag and the fact they had not been labelled as the essentials.

The Japanese Encephalitis, which is present in the Middle ­East and South East Asia (India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Korea, etc), gets transmitted by mosquitoes (as does the Nile Fever here in Canada).

 Rabies was another one of those diseases affecting the brain. It gets transmitted by animal bite, such as dogs, cats and raccoons (not all of which will appear aggressive, some could be lethargic). The vaccine isn’t a 100% effective against rabies: if you get bitten you must rinse the wound for several minutes with clean water and soap and you have to get treatment quickly. Getting the vaccine doesn't mean you can avoid treatment, but from what I gathered it could lighten the treatment post­exposure.

As with any vaccine, these vaccines may not protect 100% of people who receive it. Really, to me, vaccines are about playing the odds. Looking back, if my private insurance hadn't covered the said vaccines, I might hot have taken the rabies and the ViVAXIM shot. I was set on getting the tetanus shot going in and I do believe I would have gotten the Japanese Encephalitis vaccine regardless.

I'm not pretending to be a doctor or pharmacist and know everything there is to know about vaccines. This information is about what I have understood of the process and the reasoning behind the vaccines I agreed to take. It's about the considerations that came into play when I decided to get travel vaccinations : health, side effects, costs and, in my case, fear of needles. I did go back to the nurse to ask why the rabies vaccine was recommended, if treatment was still required upon exposure. She answered that less vaccines post-exposure would be necessary and that hemoglobin wouldn't be required. This would be the main advantage, as hemoglobin can be hard to find depending where you are and not necessarily safe, since not necessarily tested the way HemaQuebec does here.

If you understand French, the blog Le Pharmachien has this neat strip about vaccination misconceptions. This is a neat blog I follow and I suggest you check it out : http://www.lepharmachien.com/vaccins/.

Other sources I have looked at are :

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/155580.php

http://www.mayoclinic.com

http://chealth.canoe.ca/

http://www.cdc.gov/

http://www.nhs.uk

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/side-effects.htm

Last Board Meeting

Slowly, but surely, I'm sorting through my life and tying up loose ends before leaving for Australia in January. It started to feel real when I bought my ticket last Saturday and it feels even more real now that I've officially turned a page of my life. After informing the other administrators during the previous meeting, tonight was my last Board meeting.

Collaborating with the CIPTO was truly an amazing experience. This non-profit organization strives to helps people struggling with drug addictions, homelessness and social exclusion among other things. It also helps people suffering from those issues to get access to the resources necessary for their recovery and social reinsertion.

I've been seating on this Board for about a year and a half now out of a two-year mandate. I learned a lot from it and it was a really productive experience. I have been blessed to see progress on different files and I'm a bit disappointed to not be around for some very interesting developments to come.


As an organization it does amazing social work and I count myself lucky to have had a chance to work with a team of such dedicated individuals. While I have tons of exciting things coming my way, I know I will miss my involvement in this great cause and I have no doubt I will want to look into contributing again upon my return.

For now though, my plate is quite full as I have many other things to take care of before leaving. Paperwork mostly at this point.

Creating a Will

If there is a topic that created almost has much waves as the announcement of the trip around the world, it’s no doubt the creation of a will in light of the said travel plans. This might seem like a needlessly gloomy topic, but it is a necessary one. Telling people about this – other than the one I was planning to name my executor – might have been a mistake, but I had been considering it since before starting to plan for this trip. It simply became a necessity for me now. Surprisingly and despite how smart producing a will is, the idea was sometimes met with an irrational reaction. Some people were under the impression that creating a will meant I thought I was going to die out there.

Truth is, if I was convinced of my impending death, I probably would not go on this trip at all. This is really just a precaution to protect my assets and make sure they go where I want them to go if something does indeed happen. Putting your head in the sand has never reduced risks or magically made problems go away.

More so, let’s consider for a second that life threatening accidents don't all happen overseas... That they can happen in your backyard, on your way to work, when you do sports, etc. I really should have created that document a long time ago. In fact, it was negligent of me not to do so before.

While creating a will is a smart move, the conversation that must follow is never fun. I suppose it has to do with forcing your loved ones and those who love you to consider something might happen to you. That you neither invincible nor eternal.

I don’t think anyone could blame me fore wanting to put my things into order before leaving for such an extensive amount of time. I just want to get rid of some of the clutter in my house, see people I haven't seen in a while and, yes, create a will.

The first step in this process is actually deciding whether or not you need a will. A will not only dictates the distribution of your assets, but names the guardians of your children, if you have some, and addresses how your remains are to be handled. There is also another document called a Power of Attorney that designates someone to take the decisions for you if you are incapacitated. In a Power of Attorney and in a Living Will, you can state what types of treatments you want or do not want to receive and you can name someone to take health care decisions for you in the event that you become unable to do so. Hard decisions, like whether or not to maintain life support, can tear a family apart. Those documents can facilitate such processes.

Now let’s say you have decided to create a will. Your next step will be deciding whether to write it yourself or to get counsel from a lawyer. In my case, I ended up deciding to go with a lawyer for a few reasons. First, I wanted my will to be done in a way that nobody could contest its content and second, I wanted my will to be easy to track down. Keeping a single copy in my safe at home, which nobody can access, would be quite counterproductive. When it came time to look for a professional, I received quotes ranging from $300 to $2500. In the end I decided to go with my family's lawyer, mainly so that the original document would be easy to track down. While this was a deciding factor for me, you have to figure out what is important to you.

To wrap up for today, I think there are few documents in adult life that are as important as a will. I’m still in the process of creating mine, so you can expect some more feedback in January as I will try to pass along other important information on the topic in case it could be useful to you.