In my youth, I had never invested in travel insurance. In my mind, it was money best spent on my holiday. Those dollars may have been the difference between 2 cocktails a day versus three, or a day trip to an island, a helicopter ride or a fancy meal in a nice restaurant. With cocktails. I wasn’t particularly attached to my luggage and if my clothes were delayed, well so be it; I’d hand wash my underwear if I had to. I was prepared to do this just to save on travel insurance.
And then I started a job in travel/emergency assistance.
During my career, I came across all kinds of emergencies that travellers would face. Sometimes they were the “delayed or lost luggage” cases, but mostly they were medical emergencies. We averaged 120 cases per day of Australian travellers getting into all sorts of trouble in all kinds of places. It was my job to find solutions to help them.
Without naming names here is one case I assisted in.
A 68 year old Australian gentleman traveling alone in Burma, suddenly had a heart attack and found himself in the ICU of a hospital in Yangon. He needed to move quickly to the nearest centre of medical excellence, which in his case was Bangkok. He had travel insurance with one of our clients which had a strict policy on pre-existing conditions. His heart attack was complicated, and without appropriate local medical reports, it was difficult to determine if his heart attack was directly linked to his pre-existing medical condition.
All I knew was; we had to get him out of there fast. We had to present the case to the insurance company and ask them to cover an air ambulance, medical expenses in Bangkok and possibly flights for his wife to be by his side.
The cost was over AUD$100,000.
The insurance company did not want to authorise the costs. It was a lot of money and they wanted time to consider it. We didn’t have time to play.
While seeking cover for him, I also had my colleagues in Bangkok find an aircraft, an ICU crew, and a hospital admission. I contacted his wife and daughters in Perth and let them know what stage we were at with moving him. My medical colleagues monitored his condition remotely and gave regular updates to the family. We were losing time and were scared we were losing him.
I negotiated again with the insurance company and together we came to an agreement. They would act in good faith as long as the family in Australia agreed to pay all costs should the condition be considered pre-existing. I spoke to the family again, they wanted to have a family meeting to discuss it, they needed time to think.
While the insurance company and the family deliberated, we lost airspace over Burma, and then we lost the flight crew. We had to start again. My team had been working all day on helping this man and suddenly it seemed like all hope was lost. Tension was high.
Finally we found another aircraft and crew and we launched. On assessing the patient in Yangon, the prognosis was very poor and he arrested in the ambulance on the way to the airstrip. The crew spent 25 minutes resuscitating him, and he finally landed in Bangkok almost 10 hours after the first phone call to us asking for help.
The news was not good. He had deteriorated and was likely not going to make it beyond the weekend. I wanted his wife to be with him but she did not have a valid passport, it was Friday afternoon and the flight I was arranging for her was that evening. Time was against us so I called in some favours. I managed to get the passport office to arrange an emergency passport for the wife and stay open an extra hour so she could collect it, I knew she would be anxious so I also arranged car and driver to take her there and then directly to the airport.
I remained in the office that afternoon monitoring the case, I’d invested so much emotion and needed to see it to the end.
On arrival in Thailand, our general manager from the Bangkok office collected the wife and drove her directly to the hospital where her husband was waiting to die.
On entering ICU, the wife walked directly to her husband and wept. We tried to prepare her, but there is little you can say to prepare someone to say farewell to their husband of 40+ years. He had tubes and monitors, his skin was grey and he was lifeless.
She held his hand. She felt it move. She ignored it for a few minutes while trying to take it all in. And then she felt it move again. He opened his eyes and smiled.
Three weeks after moving him to Bangkok, our patient was discharged and allowed to return back to Australia assisted by a medical team.
He and his family probably have no idea of what went on in the background to assist them, and nor should they. Thats why they bought travel insurance.
And thats why I loved my job.
