First hurdle over

There are some things that invariably make me go a bit dizzy. One is bleeding, the other is spending lots of money; both of these things happened to me this afternoon. I had my visa medical.

It wasn't all that bad to be honest: the Polish receptionist directed me to a brusque but good-natured Australian doctor, who poked me and peered into bits of me and tickled me and hit me with a hammer and took plenty of blood and asked me very politely for a, erm, sample. He relieved me of £300, and sent me to the South African on reception at radiology. This person sent me in to the Kiwi radiologist for my chest x-ray.

Somewhere at the back of my mind I couldn't help think that this farrago of nationalities was there to rub it in that they'd been able to emigrate whilst I, thus far, have not. Smug just isn't the word. Still, they were all very helpful and pleasant, and the whole thing was over in ooh, about an hour. I'm dizzy now for two reasons.

The next steps seem simple enough. I have to collect my test results a week on Saturday. They will be in a sealed envelope. I must not open the envelope. I must enclose it with my other documents (application form, police certificate for me and the Kiwi, various bits of proof that we're an item etc) and get it to the New Zealand High Commission. It's the only copy, so if it gets lost we have to go through the whole thing again. It's not clear if I'll ever get to find out what my test results actually were, which if that's the case will be a bit of a swindle, if you ask me.

Apart from the slight dizziness, which is almost gone now, I feel quite unusual this afternoon. I'm really happy that one of the steps in the process has passed without incident, and as the excitement about leaving mounts, so does the pain of doing so. Friends and colleagues, as the date's getting closer, are reacting less with the excitement they initially showed, and more with sadness that I'm leaving. I almost want to say to people 'I know you're upset, but please try not to show it, at least not in front of me - it makes this all so much harder'.

Unreasonable I know, and I suppose it's selfish of me to say so, to an extent. Something I struggle with a bit sometimes is the desire to make everything ok for everyone else, before thinking about what's a priority for me personally. Seeing people upset because of something I'm doing pricks that emotion, unleashing waves of guilt. I don't have a solution though. I know what I want, and I know what I'm doing - the next few weeks though will be a case of putting my head down and getting on with it. It's going to be very hard indeed, but we knew that, didn't we?