Well that's Gero done, again. We drove down in Chris's V8 XR6 (awesome) so it could be serviced by Gary's mate Coxy while we were here, we've done our shopping, picked up car parts, phone chargers, auto paint and various other things for people up in Meeka, I've had my surgery, had my hair styled, had a delicious Chinese massage, and we've had our traditional immature pillow fight, the Towel Dance (something about staying in a motel makes Gary all silly, it's hysterical), a swim, and of course more selections from Geraldton's vile takeaway food outlets (Geraldton is where takeaway food comes to die), and as a bonus neither of us has food poisoning.
I discovered that us remote area residents are eligible for a thing called the Patient Assisted Travel Scheme. This is a fantastic government program where you get about 60% of your travel, food and accommodation costs refunded if you have to go to a specialist out of town or require medical services that aren't available where you live. Being middle aged means we can usually think of some pathetic medical condition we can use as a travel expense, so I am trying to think of something we can only get done in, say, Bali.
Gary didn't have much luck at the audiologist's, however - they can only offer a treatment that requires a set of noise-generating earbuds which cost $2600 EACH. Then they casually mentioned that if this was out of his budget range (?hello?), he could try listening to white noise for a few hours a day on his iPod. So naturally I googled like mad and it's quite interesting. I'm going to ring the audiologist & make them pull their finger out & offer more substantial information, but basically you can treat tinnitus this way quite effectively - there's even an iPhone app for it! We need a printout of Gary's tinnitus frequency range, then it's just a matter of getting hold of some decent headphones and downloading the right white noise MP3's for his tinnitus frequency - it retrains the brain to re-set its sensitivity to a broader range of sound. Technology is great! Once again, Google saves the day. Go, Town Googler!
OK time to go poke Gary with a stick from a safe distance & push his cup of tea under the bedroom door.
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