Originally Posted by
squeakr
There’s things I think about as an older person I wouldn’t of thought about 20 years ago. This place is I probably won’t visit now – places that but have to get a lot of inoculations, or the risk of disease is just too great.
We also now pay attention to distance/time to real medical care.
Unfortunately, "now" is the time we have the means for some of the more exotic travel.
We did have a medical emergency on a cruise ship a few years ago, and we were mighty impressed with the care. All ended well, thank goodness.
Fortunately, we were already docked. So as things seemed to be getting worse rather than better (it wasn't immediately obvious if this was really potentially life-threatening), just as I was about to suggest calling an ambulance, the doctor announced that he had just called for one.
The ER said that the ship medical team had "done everything we would have done, so we'll just keep him for observation for a while"; they gave us extra supplies of some of the meds used. Our specialists back home at a major teaching medical center said "that's exactly what we'd have done here", with a nod of approval.
However... that really did give us pause.
What if it had been more serious?
What if the doctor/team hadn't been quite so competent; there was no backup, no one else to "consult".
Obviously, if something really acute and immediately life-threatening occurs, well.... Life happens. Death happens.
But we aren't camping out in the ER waiting room for the rest of our lives.
(Maybe someday there will be *real* Virtual Reality, but until then...
)
But will we take that cruise to Antarctica, where even evacuation is going to take a lot longer, even to get started?
That's a discussion we are having, and there are a few other dream trips with similar considerations.
The other thing is that we waited until later in life to start those dream trips.
There are some things we can't easily do now, or can't do at all. We are sorry we waited, very sorry. We are trying to catch up
And our regular meds and backup/emergency meds now just take up
space.
Originally Posted by
lhrsfo
The biggest issue will probably be travel insurance. It starts becoming more expensive at about 70+ and prohibitive at some stage in the early 80s.
As for the cost of travel insurance going up with age, as long as we can *get* the right policies, we'll just include that in the total trip cost, within reason, of course.
(The one we worry about just slightly is MedJetAssist. They don't just increase rates, but at 75, they require modest medical underwriting. We think at this point it would be surprising if they gave us a "no", but if it did, that would affect our destinations. Our regular travel insurance will write the policy if one is "able to travel" on the day the policy is started. And we've had some claims, and know that they pay.)
GC