Travel is said to broaden your horizons, it introduces you to new cultures and gives you the opportunity to taste new fods, smell new smells and see amazing sights. It also brings you into contact with a horrifying array of bugs and tropical diseases.

Before setting off I got every vaccination available, and while on the road I was careful to take malaria medication every day and sleep under mosquito nets where possible.

Earlier on this week I started to feel a bit unwell. I didn’t think much of it and went to work as normal. By lunch time, I was feeling a lot worse. Hot and dizzy, my hands were tingling and my throat was starting to burn. As I had turned up to the wrong workout session at the gym that morning, and ended up in some sort of weightlifting class, I just put it down to low blood sugar. After consuming huge amounts of sugar, I went back to work and finished my shift.

The next day, the dizzyness and sickness returned, along with a raging sore throat and a horrible chesty cough. At this point I started to panic and convinced myself I had malaria / dengue fever / any other horrible thing.

Normally I would just get on with life as I have a mind-over-matter rule when it comes to illness (incidentally this drives Mother B crazy!). However, considering the countries I have been in recently I decided I should go to the doctors for a check-up.

This is where the ridiculousness began! I’m so used to the wonderful NHS, where you just turn up to your doctors and get treated for free. Here, I had to pay $80 just to see the doctor! At least she was very good, and ran through lots of checks before writing out an order for blood tests. She must have caught the puzzled expression on my face when she handed it to me, as she then gave me directions to the Pathology Company. Apparently you don’t just pop next door to see the nurse and let the surgery deal with the admin!

So I wondered off through the shopping centre to find this company. When I got there, I was asked for my Medicare card, which I don’t have, before being lead to a room by the phlebotomist. She took one look at my paperwork, gave me a mask to put on and then disappeared. She was gone for quite a long time, so I took my mask off and read my book for a bit. When she returned, she looked horrified and made me put the mask back on. She then ensured that I had pinched it tight round my nose and right under my chin. She told me that she was having trouble figuring out how to charge me for the tests and I would have to pay upfront. She wanted me to get a medicare card so I could take advantage of the reciprocal health care agreement but looked horrified by my suggestion that I walked two minutes through the shopping centre to the offices to get one. She said I may be gravely ill and she couldn’t risk me walking through a busy shopping centre! She failed to realise that the doctor didn’t seem at all worried and thought I probably had a chest infection but was sending me for tests to be on the safe side, that I had already walked through the centre twice that morning, and that I had managed to cycle to the appointment in the first place. After a further half hour of discussion, it was decided that I would pay the $430 fee upfront (!!!)  and then claim it back later. Finally, several vials of blood were taken, follwed by a throat swab and most horrifically a nasal swab. For those of you who haven’t been subjected to this particular procedure, it feels a bit like someone stabbing a needle into your brain. And then they do it a second time.

Feeling slightly sorry for myself, I went home to rest. After two more days of resting, I have coughed more than I thought possible but I’m on the road to recovery now. I still don’t have any test results but I’m going to guess its a chest infection and not malaria. If it was malaria I would probably be dead by now! I have almost entirely lost my voice and I am (temporarily) $500 poorer. I was rather stressed out at the thought that I had a terrible tropical disease when its almost certainly a run of the mill illness. But hey, thats the price you pay for adventure! In this case, adventure certainly hurt a little bit but I would take that any day over monotony.  Now I just need a speedy recovery before Christmas.

• Brisbane