HUMOUR/TRUE STORY: WHY YOU NEED TRAVEL INSURANCE

Dream holiday turns to nightmare

A German professor who went on a dream holiday to Costa Rica woke up
in an airport departure lounge to find his leg had been amputated.

The professor said he had gone to see a doctor at a hospital in San
Jose because his left foot was swollen. He said: "An aspirin usually
did the trick. I have had the problem before - it was nothing serious
- just something caused by my diabetes.

"When I got to the hospital they put me on a bed and I heard the word
amputate. I tried to protest, but before I knew it they had given me
drugs to black me out, and when I woke up I was at the departure
lounge.

"My suitcases were by my side - and then I realised my leg was
missing. I couldn't move, and when I checked my wallet I found that
£200 had been taken out and replaced with a receipt for the
amputation.

"It was like a bad dream and I could not believe what had happened."

Professor Ronald Jurisch, 50, from Dessau in Sachsen-Anhalt, said the
holiday was booked for him by friends for his birthday as the trip of
a lifetime.

After the operation, Prof Jurisch collapsed and was taken to a private
clinic where he was diagnosed with blood poisoning. He said it was
four weeks until a special medically equipped plane took him back to
Germany where he underwent 23 more operations to try and repair the
damage from the amputation.

He is now seeking to take legal action against the hospital in San Jose.

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Message: 2
Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 10:34:56 -0800 (PST)
From: Jamie Riehl camipco@bust.com
Subject: Re: WHY YOU NEED TRAVEL INSURANCE

Something not dissimilar from the missing leg story (but less dramatic) happened to my mother while on a Soviet cruise ship. She collapsed on a pier in Turkey from heatstroke and awoke once to hear the ship's doctor say (in Russian) "I can't operate here, my instruments are rusty." When they arrived at port she was rushed to hospital to have her appendix removed - she remembers waking to see her surgeon examining it puzzled "this is a perfectly healthy appendix..."

Love
Jamie

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