A British woman is stuck in a hospital thousands of miles from home after her neck suddenly ‘erupted’ from a dangerous infection while on holiday.
Pamela Gatehouse, 69, and her husband John, 71, jetted off this month for a two-stop trip to Asia to mark their 50th wedding anniversary, which was on Saturday. But their dream getaway got off to an inauspicious start when Pamela started to develop tonsillitis in India, and by the time the couple got to Thailand – the second leg of their holiday – she had contracted a more serious secondary infection. In horrifying scenes at their hotel room in Pattaya, the wound on her neck opened, spraying blood and pus across the bed.
She was rushed to the city’s BDMS Bangkok Hospital, where she underwent the first of four vital surgeries to remove dead flesh and oxygenate the wound. But the procedures have proved expensive – amounting to £15,300 in total – which husband John could has been afford by reaching the limit on their credit cards. Now, the couple are facing further medical bills with four more rounds of vacuum treatments lined up, costing £4,500 each.
Pamela and John are anticipating paying over £33,300 in total after reportedly being told their travel insurance won’t cover the expense – leaving the husband with no other choice but to set up a GoFundMe page to help them meet the costs. Appealing for donations, he wrote on the page that his wife is in a “serious condition”, and added: “The stress is killing me”. The couple have so far raised £5,445 of their £7,500 target.
John described their current situation as a “waiting game”, and told the MailOnline: “You don’t know where she’s going to survive the surgery, because she’s got COPD as well, which doesn’t help. She’s got a rare blood group, which is 0 negative. So if she bled out, then we’ve got no blood to help, because the Thai people don’t have the same blood type as Europeans. Everything is against us at the moment.”
Flying Pamela back to the UK under medical supervision will add an extra eye-watering cost of £42,500, which would only take place if a doctor signs her off as fit to fly, while a private air ambulance would cost at least £140,000. John has claimed the British embassy have not been “very helpful” throughout his wife’s ordeal, and says he is now in “desperate” need of accommodation as her hospital stay grows longer. The Mirror have contacted the Foreign Office for comment.
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