I came to Udon Thani for a two-week hip surgery. The nurse who cared for me those two weeks is now my wife.

I'm Australian, 62, and I'd spent two years limping around on a hip my doctor in Brisbane kept insisting needed surgery sooner rather than later, with a public system waiting list that kept stretching out month after month with no real date in sight.

An old workmate, already retired in Chiang Mai, told me about a private hospital in Udon Thani with a good reputation among the local expat community, prices well below what it would have cost me in Australia even paying out of pocket, and no real waiting list beyond coordinating dates.

I flew out alone, with no one to accompany me, which in hindsight was a bad idea for hip surgery, but at the time it seemed like the simplest option.

Ploy was 40 and the head nurse on the ward where I spent the two weeks of recovery after the surgery. She spoke clear, direct English, without the excessive formality of some of the doctors, and from day one made sure I understood exactly what was being done to me and why, something no one back home had ever bothered explaining in that much detail.

The first days were hard, harder than I'd imagined. The post-op pain, the difficulty moving, the strange feeling of being completely dependent on strangers in a country where I didn't speak the language. Ploy came to my room on every shift, not just to check vitals, but sometimes just to sit for five minutes and ask how I was getting through the day, something that wasn't strictly part of her job.

After a week she was already teasing me about how badly I handled the walker, and I found myself waiting for her shift every afternoon with an impatience I first told myself was just boredom from being bedridden.

A few days before discharge, I asked if she'd like to get coffee with me once I could walk unaided, outside the hospital, no scrubs or ID badge involved. She paused for a moment, unusual for her, since she normally answered everything quickly, and said yes, though she warned me, half joking, half serious, that as her patient I was still banned from trying to impress her with anything related to my hip.

Coffee turned into dinner. Dinner turned into me pushing back my flight to Brisbane twice, each time with a medical excuse about post-op check-ups I no longer actually needed that often.

I came back to Udon Thani three months later, off crutches by then, officially for a routine check-up the hospital itself confirmed in writing wasn't strictly necessary. Ploy knew that, and picked me up at the airport anyway.

Her family lives in a village an hour from the city, growing rice the way generations before them had. I went to meet them, months later, on a trip I planned this time, not her. Her father asked, with Ploy translating, whether I understood that marrying his daughter also meant taking on, as far as I was able, some responsibility for how that family fared through harvests and the years that didn't go well. I said yes, without fully knowing at the time what that would mean in practice, though over the years I've come to understand it better: some help with farm machinery, a nephew's schooling, an urgent repair on the family house during rainy season.

I sold the house in Brisbane two years ago and moved to Udon Thani for good. Ploy still works at the same hospital, in a more senior role now, and I split my days between the city's retired-expat club and regular visits to her family's village, where I'm known simply as Ploy's husband, no further explanation needed.

I still limp a little when it rains, something the surgeon warned me would happen over the years. But it's the only hip I'm going to get, and it was on that recovery ward, between painkillers and a walker that wouldn't cooperate, that I met the person I plan to stay with for whatever time I've got left.