Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Medical’ Category

There’s been quite a gap since the last post because it takes a lot of time to gather together the evidence that I’d spoken about earlier and, of course, to link it all together.

The key things are the two relationship history together with the four pillars. In practice, I linked things like bank statements, photos, 888 forms and the like to my version of the relationship history. As you’ll find there’s a guys style and a girls style of writing these things and they are very different! They do need to be consistent, but it was definitely easier to link the documents to my version due to the different style of writing.

Once we’d all the evidence collected, we wrote a table of contents listing the document names and what they were. That will make both your task easier and the task of the immigration agent reading your application that little bit easier too. We actually uploaded all the documents to my application (38 in total for us). Both relationship histories ended up around six pages long which covered a 25 year relationship, so it will be shorter if you’ve not been together that long.

It took a couple of hours to get everything uploaded as the immi site isn’t the fastest, or at least not when you’re accessing it from the UK. Don’t rush this stage as you need to get it right.

And then you click submit. After that, you’ll be needing your credit card and chances are that it’ll be declined as mine was because it looks fraudulent and I’d to call the bank. Helpfully, my bank didn’t weigh in with a payment declined message so all I saw on the immi site was “check your card details”. It’s geared up for Australian addresses, so chances are that you’ll not be able to enter the bill holder’s address 100% correctly.

Once you do get the payment made, you can then move along with the Sponsor application which is reasonably short and we did that on the same day. Or thought we had because it turns out that in addition to all the documents we’d already uploaded to the main application, we needed Wendy’s birth certificate and photo. You can’t upload these, or indeed any, documents immediately but can do a day or two later under the other documents button, so we ran up another index and uploaded that plus her passport, birth certificate, two police clearances, photo, and proof of us being in a relationship.

The other thing that you can do when you hit the submit button is organise your medical. When you click on that button, you’ve a fairly short health questionnaire to fill in and you’ll get your HAP ID which you’ll need to book your medical. The medical needs to be done by a doctor on their approved list: there’s loads in Australia, not so many in the UK. It took us so long to gather the evidence (about 18 months) that a new place had opened in Belfast in that time!

The medical is no big deal. You need to bring your passport and they’ll take a photo of you on the day. There’s two blood samples that they need, and then the doctor runs through the questions that you’d answered previously. All told, it ended up taking about an hour of which most time was spent doing the usual banging on your chest and back, checking out that you had feeling in your limbs, and, on the whole, felt like an olden tymes visit to a GP, albeit one that cost £400.

That was Tuesday morning. Wednesday afternoon I got an email from the GP saying that she’d uploaded all the information and it says on the immi site that they’ve got it.

So, 18 months or so since we started, we have a decision ready application sitting with the immi people.

How long we’ll need to wait for a decision is an interesting question. On their website, the global timescale is saying 90% are decided in two years. However, that’s including people who get requests for additional information which seems to add months to the time. For couples who have been together for ages and who have uploaded all their documents at the time of the application, it can be a whole lot faster. In fact, I’ve seen two very similar couples to us who received their visa in about a month and others in a couple of months. But, who knows?

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

No matter how much I see Wendy put it on, I still haven’t a clue what all the various items in her “paint box” are actually there for.

I think the single most confusing one is probably the eye-liner which seems a particularly weird thing to me. Not far behind are the various creams which range from day and night creams through to dark circle eye cream. At least the dark circle cream has the advantage that I know what it does: quite what night cream is for is beyond me.

That’s, of course, just a selection too and I’m quite sure that there’s a mountain of stuff that also remains beyond my understanding.Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

John managed to have freshly prepared custard spilled over his hands last Monday and has ended up having to go to the doctors every day to get the dressing changed which is a bit of a nuisance.

Whilst plonking on cream and bandages seemed a sensible way to go initially, this far down the line it’s not so clear-cut as to whether or not it’s a good idea to continue. For instance, although he knows to be careful with that hand, little boys play and over the weekend he caught a ball with it which left it bleeding, unknowingly, under the bandages. Had it not been bandages up, we’d have known that it was bleeding right away instead of hours later.

Anyway, all being well, it’ll be healed up enough to leave the dressings off later this week.

 Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

The kids new school has what they somewhat confusingly call the Community Room. It grew out of an initiative a few years back to establish links with the local community.

It’s different from the PTA in a number of aspects. For one thing, it meets every Wednesday morning for about 90 minutes rather than once in the evening every couple of months. That of itself means that the make-up of the group is largely mothers with a few fathers and grandmothers (not to mention around a dozen pre-school kids). To some extent that almost makes it a parents and toddlers group and it does take a bit of effort to steer things away from that.

The regular meetings mean that relationships are established much more quickly than in the PTA and similar groups but more importantly it means that it’s easier to organise events through this group. Thus, one of the interests at the moment is in setting up some courses to help the parents with the homework that’s starting to arrive in surprisingly large amounts. The courses run over six weeks so a regular setting is required for such things. Somewhat overlapping with the PTA there are a series of events organised by way of this group with the first one being Halloween. That’s a little confusing as there will be two events happening: one directly for the school and one only for the community group and their families.

As well as the larger courses we were treated to a basic first aid for children course this morning which covered a whole bunch of stuff that falls into the category of “stuff that you should know but hope you’ll never need to know”. So, it covered CPR, choking, bleeding, meningitis and what to do with teeth knocked out, which made for a very full 90 minutes! On the meningitis front, the deciders are if your child is getting bad fast and if they’ve cold hands and cold feet: calling 999 is the way to go if that’s happening.

Although the group was established as a means of establishing links with the local community, it seems to have become a kind of “year 8” class for the parents which is no bad thing as it will help with the kids’ education.Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

For guys cosmetics are a major minefield and one that they simple don’t even think of venturing into except around the time of Christmas or birthday presents and even then unless they’re handed a note, chances are that they’ll come back with the wrong thing.

That’s even for relatively simple stuff too. What on earth is night cream for instance? Why should it be different from day cream? When you read the descriptions there seems to be no really good reason for there to be a difference at all.

Of course the real reason for such things is that it allows for more potential marketing to be done. Thus any brand you can name puts out a whole range of stuff with different names largely so that they can sell more stuff.Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.