After not leaving the flat in Italy for a week, I hobbled my way back to the airport in Florence. They let me take my stick on the plane, transported me across the tarmac so that I didn't have to walk, and sent a wheelchair to meet me at London City airport. That was a little embarrassing, and I felt a bit of a fraud, but it was handy, as we sailed past the queues at immigration. As it happens, I would have really struggled had I had to stand in line for that long, so it was probably for the best.
We made it back to Kent for a few more days, which gave me a chance to see my GP again, and then were supposed to have been getting ready for our next trip away, which was Intrepid's first running of their trip from Bucharest (Romania) to Kiev (Ukraine), going through Moldova, Transnistria, and including a visit to Chernobyl. We had also tagged on a bit more time in Ukraine and then Poland, including a trip to Auschwitz, and a chance to catch up with a Polish friend we'd met in Antarctica. We were really looking forward to it.
Unfortunately, it was now becoming clear that my back wasn't improving, and there was no way we were going to be taking that trip. There were far to many long travel days, and long walks involved; I simply could not physically have done it. So very reluctantly, we had to cancel the whole trip.
Thankfully, whilst it was a bit of an effort to get everything needed for the claim, the insurance did at least pay out the maximum that we were covered for, so we weren't left too much out of pocket, just very disappointed not to be going.
We were offered another housesit for the cats in Stoke Newington though, which was nice, so we headed back to London, where I got myself along to the physiotherapist, and did very little except be grumpy about my back! Poor Nic, not only was he running around after me, he had to put up with my being a miserable git too. He did at least manage to catch up with a few friends while we were there though.
Gradually my back did improve, and I was able to move around a little more with the stick, but I was still pretty pathetic well into November.
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