Woke up and gingerly put weight on my left foot. To my surprise it felt pretty good. Aching a bit, but no sharp pain. Dave the Wizard Physio’s magic strapping was working. I’m half a chance of going on this trip. Big project for today was to go and see Dr Tony Wettstein, a gastroenterologist at St Vincent’s Hospital who specialises in drug resistant parasites in the gut. One of the downsides of long distance swimming is that you swallow a lot of water and sometimes after rain, especially after rain at Balmoral, or other places in Sydney harbour you don’t want to even think about what is going down your throat. I was diagnosed a month ago with not one, but two, bad arse parasites in my stomach, Blastocystis hominis and Dientamoeba Fragilis. These bad boys were first detected inside me about a year ago after a spell of very heavy rain in Sydney. Normal oral treatment with the antibiotic drug Flagyl has failed to shift them. They give you a long term infection and one of the side effects is intense lethargy. Maybe that’s why some days I struggle to get out of bed. I’ve also been swimming really slowly. I blamed the surgery. Maybe not. Wettstein had been recommended to me as an expert in hard to shift gut parasites. I turned up to his rooms at St Vincents and sure enough he kept me waiting for 3/4 of an hour. Why do doctors always keep you waiting? If I kept my clients waiting for that long I wouldn’t have a business. So he explains that the bad boys in my gut can’t be shifted by normal, single-dose antibiotics down the gob. I’ve got to have three drugs Furazolidone, Nitazoxanide and Secnidazole administered via colonoscopy infusion. Sounds like a nuclear weapon inserted inside me. He left me with no doubt there will be nothing much left alive in there after he’s finished. Normally I would be pissed off about another medical procedure but all I could think of was, Can I walk 80kms next week? Nothing else matters at this stage. I’ve got to get on that plane. This year is turning into a tour of all the different branches of modern medicine. Surely I must run out soon. I’ll have seem them all. Such are the joys of sporting injuries, surgery, rehab, physiotherapy and now parasites!