… you are going to the hospital.” That’s what Nurse Practitioner Sarah at the Bayview Medical Center told me before giving me a prescription for high powered antibiotics and advice to take paracetamol (what they call Tylenol here) and ibuprofen for the pain and fever. The fever of 39 degrees C seemed to alarm her, too, and she made me remove all the thermal layers I was wearing and promise not to bundle up again.

What symptoms would be an indication to go to the Cottage Hospital in Kawakawa? “If you start feeling sicky,” Nurse Sarah intoned, “and you are obviously not feeling sicky now.”

The visit, for a non-NZ resident, cost under $50 US with no insurance.

I am not usually very good at following instructions to remain immobile. But given that taking ten steps from a sitting position was extremely painful yesterday, I have actually been lying on the settee in the main salon, leg draped over the back cushion, reading and occasionally glancing up at the blue New Zealand sky for two whole days now. New Zealand is out there somewhere. The familiar confines of our floating home are not a bad place to heal. I actually finished a Jonathan Franzen novel.

Robin is taking great care of me and just served a delicious mushroom polenta for dinner.

I feel like we once again dodged a bullet - if our passage took two days longer and this malady struck at sea, it might be a different, darker story. But as it turns out we did have the correct antibiotic on board - we just hadn’t figured it out yet. And we both need to be less dismissive of minor pains - my leg started hurting a week ago, but I just assumed I must have bruised it beating into the wind and getting thrown about the boat by the restless South Pacific.