I was working in the IT department of a casino and we had been ramping up for the devil that was Y2K. The hysteria of the time had led to lots of government and corporate attention on our systems and the general feeling was “bugger planes falling out of the sky, we have to make sure the punters don’t get a new year’s bonus if something goes haywire”. In the last weeks of December many long hours and practice runs took place to make sure we were ready for anything.

Sometime during that period I noticed I had a patch on my right upper arm that had this weird burning feeling. Like sunburn, but it didn’t hurt to touch and there was no red mark or anything. It was more annoying than alarming and so I chose to ignore it.

New Years Eve passed as we all know with no ill effects and all of the stress and long hours were left behind with a sigh of relief and a lot of “told you so” between us techie types. I had some leave booked and was looking forward to sitting around doing absolutely nothing. The kids were with their father for the school holidays and while I had some social stuff planned, for most of the time I planned to be on IRC talking to friends and playing computer games.

It was a fairly hot January and where I was living had no air conditioning. I have never liked the heat much and so had a fan set up to point at me and the computer. The PC was not happy in the heat and would shut down every now and then and I would take the opportunity to take snoozes till it cooled down.

The burning feeling on my skin had migrated to my chest area and had grown to quite a large amount of skin real estate. On top of that the ends of my ribs developed a nasty pain. I wrote that off as being something to do with bad chair I was sitting in and my posture was bad. Also it seemed that my feet would occasionally tangle around each other and I would trip up, but as I wasn’t really moving around much I could ignore it.

It’s amazing how your brain can absorb and adjust to things such as these. I truly had no surface fear that something was terribly wrong. Even when my daughter’s birthday rolled around and eating the chocolate mud cake produced the weird effect of tasting like chocolate on one side of my tongue and tasted like poo on the other side. Probably a cold coming or something, nothing to worry about at all! Denial is an amazing thing.

The denial was sustainable while I was by myself, but a week later I went out with friends for dinner to celebrate Australia Day. I drove for an hour across the city to where we were to meet and staggered (literally) out of the car. As I grabbed onto anything that would support me as I walked into the restaurant I saw the face of one of my friends, and ex ambulance driver. The change from smiling to this horrible shocked look was like a splash of ice water, it suddenly hit me I was in trouble, there was no hiding it.

I copped a major lecture about going to the hospital ASAP and why hadn’t I seen a doctor. I remember that nothing was said about what it could be, probably not to freak me out, but I should have known by the shocked look that he thought that it was something serious. I managed to talk my way out of it pointing out that I had to go visit my mother the next day and that we had a date to go to the local club for a girls night out. I promised that I would get it seen to (whatever this was) after I had seen her.

To be continued….

‘Fireworks (Yellow-Red-Blue+Green)‘ by BONGURI via Flickr
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