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Aloha

Fri 17 May 2013

Hi! I’m Hamish and on Sunday 20th March 2011 I arrived in Hawaii to take part in the 26th Annual Pacific Basin Music Festival, with 57 other students from around the world. Before I left I had to contact my Haemophilia Centre and get all of my forms for travelling completed. I had to see the haematologist and get him to write two letters. One that said I was allowed to carry my factor on the plane and have all of my supplies and the other was for the NSW Department of Education.

Wednesday night was the matinée performance. There were 8 bands playing at the festival and my band was on 7th. I started to get a bit nervous as I heard the clapping, as the band before us stopped playing. We walked in, we all took our places. We nailed it! To us, we played the best that we had played and we were pleased with what we did. We got a silver. We were one mark off getting a gold.

After Wednesday I had the rest of the week free. On Thursday night there was an encore performance for the band who won and the local navy band performed as well. On Friday we went for a tour around the island and I got to see different things like where there was a volcano that’s now a beach and we saw where some of the footage from Jurassic Park was made.

On Sunday it was time to go back to the airport. I had packed my treatment product with icepacks to keep my factor cool. The only time there was any problem was when my bag got searched on the way out of Hawaii by US customs. They wanted to look and check that my icepacks were not stuffed with anything.

I encourage other young people to travel. Go for it. It’s fun and you get to see things you wouldn’t see here in Australia and experience a different culture. I suggest you have enough spare product when you travel and to talk to your haemophilia nurse about letters and documents you need to carry with you explaining that you are required to carry needles and treatment product with you on the plane. I also made sure I took photocopies of all the documentation for my own records.


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Filed Under
customs haemophilia holiday HTC NSW travel treatment