A British backpacker has revealed how she was struck down with a deadly disease which she had initally mistaken for a bad hangover.
lysha Pyrgotis, from Bradford, West Yorkshire, was left vomiting and suffering ‘extreme diarrhoea’ after catching typhoid fever on the remote Indonesian party island of Gili Trawangan in June this year.
She had initially thought her symptoms of the bacterial infection, which can kill one in five of those infected if they don’t seek treatment, was a result of having one too many drinks the night before.
But when she became physically unable to get out of bed due to feelings of being ‘delirious’ combined with deep muscle and bone pain, the 27-year-old knew she was in a lot more bother than first assumed.
She said: ‘I couldn’t concentrate at all, that’s when I started to panic. The guy I was travelling with at the time started to realise I was quite poorly, I wasn’t hungover.
‘He spoke to the person at the hostel and we had a look online, there weren’t any hospitals. I was on a very small island, there wasn’t really healthcare, it was really unlucky that I was there at the time.
‘It was just like my body didn’t want anything inside it, it was trying to get rid of everything. I didn’t eat anything for the whole time I was really ill.
‘Even water, I would sip water and it would come straight back up. It was a very, very extreme sickness.’
lysha Pyrgotis was left vomiting and suffering ‘extreme diarrhoea’ after catching typhoid fever on the remote Indonesian party island of Gili Trawangan in June this year
She had initially thought her symptoms of the bacterial infection was a result of having one too many drinks the night before
When physically unable to get out of bed due to feelings of being ‘delirious’ combined with deep muscle and bone pain, Ms Pyrgotis knew she was in a lot more bother than first assumed
Fortunately, Ms Pyrgotis managed to seek the help of a local doctor who confirmed her positive test for the disease – meaning it was caught before the symptoms worsened to the point of being fatal.
But that was little consolation at the time for the tourist, who said the extremity of the sickness left her feeling like it could kill her.
She added: ‘I thought I was going to die, to be honest. It was that bad, I literally thought “this is it”.
‘I was really worried about telling my family – I didn’t tell them until after I’d been poorly because they were having a lot of stress at work at the time.
‘I thought it was not going to end well for me. I was panicking as I knew I had to leave the country soon. I was really, really scared.’
The backpacker, who had spent time in south Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and the Philippines before heading to Indonesia, then spent her final days abroad in a small, cramped medical shack hooked up to an IV drip.
Despite still feeling ‘very sick’, Ms Pyrgotis received a negative typhoid test and promptly had to get on a ‘horrific’ flight to Bangkok due to her visa approaching its expiry date.
She said the lasting effects of the disease took a few weeks to get out of her system, and has now called on holidaymakers to take care where she admitted she may not have.
Ms Pyrgotis managed to seek the help of a local doctor who confirmed her positive test for the disease – meaning it was caught before the symptoms worsened to the point of being fatal
The backpacker spent her final days abroad in a small and cramped medical shack hooked up to an IV drip as she recovered
The 27-year-old said the extremity of the sickness caused by the disease left her feeling like it could kill her
Ms Pyrgotis continued: ‘I’m not going to say “nobody pet the stray animals” because that’s one of my favourite parts of travelling, but I think washing your hands is really important afterwards, because that’s something I really didn’t do.
‘I was in the middle of nowhere petting stray animals and then going about my day for hours without access to water to wash my hands with. I didn’t bring any sanitiser either.
‘I think general handwashing and being careful with what you eat out there. A lot of street food you eat isn’t kept in clean conditions, it’s in a hot country on the street.
‘Chicken is sat out for hours and the cleaning utensils are probably not cleaned to the standard you would in the west.
‘I just wasn’t careful where I ordered my food from. I was just eating everything that looked good and smelled good at the time – and that’s probably not the wisest thing to do.’
