Adventures in the Australian health care system...

I've been here for almost two weeks now, and apparently my body decided that it was high time I investigated the Australian medical system.  So, here follows my slightly hazy account (with a bit of aid from the discharge summary) of my health care adventures on February 16th.

I woke up at around 2:30, 2:45 in the morning, with a heck of a lot of pain on my right side.  I thought at first that it might be a really bad cramp, however it rapidly got a lot worse, and I vomited a couple of times.  As soon as I realised that the pain wasn't going away, I called the emergency line at Campus East, since I didn't actually know the number to call for an ambulance...anyway, the RAs here all banded together to help me out, and two of them took me to the emergency room.

We got there, and then I had to attempt to answer questions for the insurance forms, thanks to the fact that I'm not Australian; thankfully Billie, one of the RAs, was there with me because I couldn't think straight, and help me answer questions about the timeline regarding what had happened.  Finally, after I answered more questions, and attempted to stop hyperventilating, they took me to a bed in the emergency room, put on one of those wonderful hospital gowns, and they gave me a bunch of morphine for the pain, and hooked me up to some machines to monitor my vitals.

Over the course of the day, some doctors poked and prodded me, and gave me drugs to counter nausea.  I couldn't actually keep any food down until the afternoon, so they kept me in until I didn't bring anything back up.  I was sent for an ultrasound in the afternoon as well, which lead to my diagnosis of an ovarian cyst that ruptured.  When the doctor explained the symptoms associated with that particular diagnosis, it all fit, and the ultrasound proved the theory.

Anyway, so there's what happened to me over the course of the day yesterday.  I'm all good now, just a little bruised on my arm thanks to where they had to put in the IV, but the nausea's all gone, thankfully.