This post is sponsored by Southern Cross Travel Insurance.

The countdown was on – there was exactly one week to go before our much anticipated Disneyland vacation.  I was in the stage I call pre-packing – throwing everything out of the drawers that I think  we may take before whittling down the choices to the single bag I carry mine and my kids possessions in when traveling.  What I didn’t need was to find myself while on my lunch-break suddenly sitting in the gutter, my whole body shaking.  The shakes lasted for about ten minutes during which time I felt like I was going to die and after which I felt just marginally better.  I had no warning those shakes were coming however being a doctor I knew what they were.  They were “rigors”,  a sign that the body is experiencing some sort of serious infection.  I had been nursing a nasty cold for the previous week and though i must have developed pneumonia so chomped on some antibiotics I hand hanging out in my medicine cabinet and put myself to bed.  It was during the night that the pain hit – a sharp knife in my abdomen to the right and below my umbilicus.  If I were an honest blogger I would describe in detail the expletives that passed through my mind when I felt that pain – not just because it hurt like hell but because I knew our Disneyland trip was almost certainly off.  I am however not someone that usually swears.  Let me just paraphrase and say that I thought “Good grief.  I have appendicitis.

“I can’t have appendicitis” I argued to my surgeon the next morning.  “We are going to Disneyland in six days.  I have a three year old.  He is expecting to meet Mickey Mouse in 6 freaking days, I am not one of those mums that breaks their promises.”

That crummy, residual piece of intestinal tissue, the appendix, however useless can cause a lot of trouble though if it is infected and not dealt with.  Trouble meaning potential death.   So, date with Mickey Mouse or not I was having abdominal surgery.  I believe the last thing I said to my husband before I was wheeled down to theatre was “Call our travel insurers and tell them what is going on.”

Fortunately our travel insurers informed my husband that if the trip was cancelled we would be reimbursed for our trip expenses to allow us to rebook.  Even more fortunately my recovery was spectacular and my surgeon cleared me to travel to Los Angeles – we flew out two days after I was discharged from hospital.

It got me thinking though, how lucky I was not to have developed appendicitis on the plane, or during our vacation in the United States.  I have experienced the stupendously enormous medical bills even minor interactions with the U.S health system can entail.  On a previous trip Stateside  I required assessment in an emergency department.  I was in the department for 4 hours, had one medical image taken, spent 15 minutes with one doctor and warranted no treatment.  I almost fell over then when I was smacked with a $5000 dollar bill.  By my estimates, just based on that experience a four day hospital stay and abdominal surgery would have cost us around $50000 dollars if my appendix had decided to misbehave ten days later.  Now I know there are people out there that are mega-rich for whom a $50000 or so surprise bill is no big deal.  I am not one of them.  Just one of the reasons we always purchase travel insurance before traveling internationally is to avoid nasty surprise super bills.

Tips to guide you when purchasing travel insurance.

• Check the fine print regarding any pre-existing conditions.  Our son has asthma and some travel insurers will not cover him if he requires hospitalisation when overseas.  These clearly aren’t a fit for our family and we pay a little more to make sure he is covered when we are traveling.
• Do be honest about your pre-existing conditions, if your aren’t and you get into strife you run the risk of not being covered.  Southern Cross Travel Insurance (who sponsored this article) give you the option to nominate your pre-existing conditions with few exclusions.
• Make sure your travel insurance will cover the cost of rescheduling a trip for the entire family if one of you becomes unwell.  Purchasing family cover should help with this. For example, it would have been no good if our insurer was only willing to cover the expense of rescheduling my trip when I had appendicitis as we travel as a family unit.
• Traveling while pregnant?  Make sure your insurer will cover you for complications that may arise in your pregnancy.  If you are traveling internationally in the second half of your pregnancy you should attempt to find insurance that will cover the care of your baby if it is born pre-term when you are overseas.   Have had a little personal experience of this myself (although I was traveling within Australia on this occasion)  I went into threatened pre-term labour on a baby moon island vacation necessitating a dramatic midnight helicopter evacuation to the mainland.  If we had been vacationing internationally we would have owed big bucks for the evacuation.

The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs Smarttraveller.gov.au site advises Australians that if the “can’t afford travel insurance they can’t afford to travel.”  Gotta say folks, I agree with them.

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