I generally don’t believe in regrets. I firmly believe that life is lived forward, not backward, and while I might learn from the past, I don’t revisit decisions to say, “Oh, it should have been x instead of y”. I try to make decisions with the best information I have at the time, and I live with them. There is no other choice.

Yet a decision we made before Christmas didn’t necessarily weigh risk factors as well as we should have.

Our shared need to relax

I’m just going to say it…2024 sucked.

Work isn’t always a barrel of laughs, but there was extra stuff this year that made it less enjoyable. Nothing egregious, even when it seemed so at the time. Finances are fine, all our basic life elements are covered, etc.

Health was a pain in the butt. Somewhere back in March, I did something to my lower back. I don’t know what, I don’t know how. But suddenly I started getting seizures and spasms that had me literally screaming in pain. Two trips to the ER, Xrays, meds, tons of physio and osteo stuff, and it would get better for a while — only to flare up again. Definitely not fun. By way of scaling it, if that pain was daily, if the seizures never let up, I’d be looking at much more serious decisions about my future come March (1 year in). I have no appetite for that kind of life. But let’s leave it at “sucking” for now.

Jacob’s health has been, well, probably worse although not acute. He’s dealing with chronic pain from what we thought was a concussion but probably wasn’t. Every day he has headaches and dizziness, and while we’ve made progress on the headache front, the dizziness remains unabated. His attendance at school is a crapfest. Every day is a game day decision — can he go? which periods? I’ve been fortunate that work has given me special accommodation to deal with his schedule, but it’s still looney toons some weeks. Plus dozens of appointments for the year, perhaps hundreds now. It feels like a roller coaster we can only survive, we cannot thrive.

Andrea’s health wasn’t great, but not scary bad. More “life”, I guess.

We had three funerals this year, so there’s that. Don, my brother; Andrea’s uncle, Scott; and Andrea’s grandfather, Doug. Just writing that sentence has started the waterworks for me. Each is different, each is painful, each is raw. Not “was”, but “is”. Less acute, but still raw.

So, we wanted a chance to relax. We needed it. And we started thinking, “Hey, how about a trip down South?”.

Not enough nuance to our parameters

Andrea did a bunch of the initial searching. But we were trying to parse some parameters to limit the risk. We were worried about the trip. We wanted to keep the travel process to a manageable level of chaos, partly for Jacob’s stamina and endurance. We wanted a good beach, not too big a resort, nice pool, some activity options. We did NOT want big things like trips to Tulum. It was likely to be a resort trip, not an excursions trip.

Looking through all the travel options that Andrea had found, the trips were inconsistent…one would have a great flight down, and then coming back, overnight in Toronto or Montreal. Or leave really early and take 12-14 hours to get to the destination airport. Until I looked at the Air Transat packages that she had found. All of their flights were direct from Ottawa to the destination airport, no transfers or routings. They had Cuba, Jamaica, Dominican Republic and Mexico. Andrea’s been to Jamaica, we’ve all been to Mexico; the DR is relatively simple, and more attractive to us than Cuba. So we settled early. A 6:00 p.m. departure arriving around 10:00 p.m. at night, 4 hour flight down; coming back, it left really late (almost midnight), but again, a quick 4-hour hop back. Hah!

We got cancellation insurance, option to bail for any reason, which seemed good just in case we weren’t up to going. Between Jacob’s dizziness and my back, we weren’t sure everything would be going smoothly. A few days before going, I began to wonder if we had made the right choice. Jacob was behind on school, and had worked really hard the week before Christmas to get caught up. Which he did. But if we stayed home for a week, instead of going away, he could get a jump on the stuff he had to do in January before he got to his summative exams and final project deadlines. I was wondering if a staycation might not have been a better weighting of “value-added”. Yet we all really wanted the break, to go somewhere and get our heads out of our existing lives. We stuck to the plan.

The flight down, a 4-hour hop, was a bit misleading. It left later than scheduled, no big problem. There’s a one-hour time-difference to DR from Ottawa, so we actually were getting in an hour later, although that goes out in the wash. The deplaning and luggage process took forever — customs was easy, but everything else took almost 90 minutes. We then found our bus to the resort, which was supposed to be about an hour, and was actually closer to 90 minutes. The last 30m of the trip was listening to, I think, Placido Domingo singing opera which seemed like torture honestly. Once we were at the resort, maybe 20 of us checking in, it took forever. And I was completely spent. I couldn’t deal with people. My patience was at zero at this point. It literally took them 25 minutes to check the three of us ONCE WE GOT TO THE DESK. We were last of 20 or so. It was about 3:30 when we got to sleep. Not awesome.

For the week, we had a good beach albeit with very limited visibility in the bay. And Jacob’s dizziness? Exacerbated by being in the ocean. We had hoped to spend a good portion of the week reading and swimming at the beach, and Jacob couldn’t do it. Equally, I had trouble getting in and out of the ocean as there was a drop-off close to where we started (there were other options farther over with more gradual entry, apparently). And yet, I still have problems with my shins with repeated wounds. Which I did something to about a week before leaving, and it was still weeping. I could go in the ocean, but I couldn’t / shouldn’t go in the pool. We made compromises, but our swimming plans for the week were heavily messed up. We didn’t plan for many excursions, thought we could do some stuff on the property but there really wasn’t anything to see or do. There was a small plaza across the road we went to a couple of times for specific things. It wasn’t a bad resort, we just planned on more relaxing and found that it was too quiet for us. We needed a bit more oomph. The daily activities looked like bad summer camp, and the nighttime shows were laughable. The food at the main and secondary restaurants was okay, not bad, but not particularly scintillating. It was fine, with decent desserts. There were also three a la carte restaurants — Italian, French and Mediterranean. We liked the Italian the best; the French was okay, we didn’t feel a need to go back, while the Mediterranean was heavily seafood-oriented yet not amazing. If we were at home, we would go to the Italian one, occasionally, although there are better ones out there; we probably would not go to either of the other two more than once to try it.

In short, we were bored. We had booked for 9 days, but after 4 days, we looked into the cost to switch to just 7 days and to go home early…it was exorbitant to change, the flights were full, etc. so we left it as is.

New Year’s Eve was Tuesday night (we arrived on Friday), and we enjoyed the night. Dinner was late, we went back to the room and played games, and then they did fireworks at midnight. By some fluke in avoiding a dancing crowd across the street that was too loud for Jacob, we ended up walking a bit down the road for a better view, and it was like we were all alone having our own private fireworks show for 20-25 minutes. It was really great. Not so great when something hot landed on Jacob and Andrea, but they weren’t hurt, just surprised. We wandered down to a gazebo on a pier after midnight and said goodbye to 2024. I embraced a small ritual I had read about of taking a stone, imbuing it with all your negative thoughts from the past year, and just chucking it in the ocean. I hadn’t realized how stressed I was about the year until we did it…I felt a large release, and was even a bit emotional hugging Jacob and Andrea.

The real problem though is that I got the flu on Tuesday / Wednesday. Tuesday afternoon, I had a scratchy throat and was starting to feel a bit off; full cold-like symptoms on Wednesday. Spent a bit of extra time just at the room trying to sleep it off. Andrea started getting sick on Thursday, Jacob on Friday. By Sunday, Andrea was so sick that we had to go talk to the doctor on the resort, who recommended shipping her off to Punta Cana by cab to get them to do xrays and stuff. Her lungs had extra stuff sounding in it, and with Andrea’s medical history, we agreed it was a good idea.

Of course, that was our last day. And checkout from the room was supposed to be noon. I tried to get them to extend, and they gave me the runaround. I was completely caught…I had to checkout, but we wanted to leave Jacob at the resort even though he was feeling like crap now, and Andrea needed to go to the private hospital, get looked at, and get back so we could take our evening flight. It was a complete mess. The hotel was useless. In the end, I had to send Andrea off on her own, and I stayed with Jacob. I got nasty with the hotel staff as they were completely f***ing useless, and then later said, “Oh, we extended you in the room”, 2 hours after I had already checked out. They didn’t bother to tell me. F***ing asshat. So Jacob and I spent the day in the big open-air lobby, charging our phones, repacking bags, and Jacob running to the bathroom to vomit while I tried to connect with Andrea who was at the hospital in Punta Cana (90 minutes away) with a dying phone. She made it back, we got a prescription filled, found a way to pay the cab driver, packed our stuff, got on a shuttle bus and went to the airport. Jacob was really not well and travelling was horrendous for both him and Andrea. Flights were delayed, and we didn’t get home until almost 4 in the morning, which was 5:00 DR time. Not a good combo in the end.

Post-holiday recovery

On the Sunday for the return trip, I was vertical and probably in the best shape of all of us. I had some meds, I jacked the cold stuff even with decongestant which I’m not supposed to take, and focused on what we needed to check in, get us to the gate, etc. The flights were delayed as I said, and he was sick a couple of times at the airport. Andrea was focusing on breathing. My problem was more diarrhea, and I had Imodium on speeddial, but it was still messing me up.

We had planned that all three of us would take the Monday off when we got back as we knew we’d get in late at night / early in the morning. I missed almost the whole week of work. I was off the first couple of days, easily, and then slowly back online a bit by the end of the week, but not fully working. It was a full extra week after the trip to get back to something resembling functionality.

Andrea ended up back in the ER, twice actually, and it turned out the first doctor was right. She DID have stuff going on with her lungs — full pneumonia. She missed work for all of the first week, most of the second, and now two weeks afterwards, she is still fighting a persistent cough.

Jacob? Well, our decisions might have f***ed him for school. Our whole schtick for the last year has been getting him back to school more regularly and for longer periods of time. And after catching up before Christmas, he just missed almost all of the last two weeks. He has had a full-on flu case for two weeks. He managed a couple of classes this week, but he’s still fighting a bad cough. And because he has small lungs, it’s hard for him to clear phlegm and stuff. He’s doing everything he can to finish his semester but it is a rough go.

Not regret, but…

In the end, I suspect I picked up something on the plane on the way down. It took a few days to take hold, and then once it did, I infected Andrea and Jacob. Andrea was sleeping next to me, Jacob was in the same room, the physical path of contamination/contagion looked like a straight line in the hotel room.

And to be honest, that risk was nowhere on my radar. Sure, travelling on a plane is always a risk. COVID, flu, colds, whatever. But we’re fully vaccinated, and if I had thought of it at all, it would likely have been a relatively minor annoyance. I did not envision that it could knock all three of us on our butts for 2-3 weeks.

Is what I feel regret? If I had thought about it, we would have discussed it and rated it pretty low-risk…medium probability perhaps, it’s easy to get sick on a plane, but with relatively low impact. Sick for a few days, move on.

It’s easy to conflate a bunch of stuff together. A less-than-exciting trip; bad logistics at times; terrible experience at the end; and we got really sick. But if we hadn’t got sick, it would have been a shoulder shrug. New Year’s Eve was great, one of the better ones that I have had in recent memory perhaps. I liked getting away, I liked our ritual. I can lament some features of the trip, but I wouldn’t have even come close to “regretting it”, more just it didn’t work out as well as our previous trip to Mexico. We didn’t get the parameters right for balance perhaps. One of the benefits of our driving trips is we had stuff inherently built into each day; the DR was more emotionally flat. Except for getting sick, it would have been more disappointing than bad.

And if we had stayed home, we likely would have gone out for dinner a couple of times on our staycation, or to some museums, etc. And we could have just as easily gotten sick sitting next to people in an IMAX movie.

I’ll write in future about our actual trip, and the activities we did. In the end, I don’t think it was a bad holiday decision, just one that didn’t work out as well. And perhaps we didn’t adequately consider the risks of the impact for Jacob for school if he gets really sick and misses more time. Sigh.

Ultimately, Everyone’s fine. The news of our deaths was (slightly) exaggerated. But we sure don’t feel rested or like we had a good break.