British backpacker diagnosed with deadly disease after thinking symptoms were a bad hangover
A British backpacker thought she was merely hungover before being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness.
Alysha Pyrgotis, 27, has recounted her horror story after fighting through the deadly disease while out in Asia earlier this summer.
"I was bed bound, in a lot of pain with my muscles and my bones. I was a bit delirious. I couldn’t concentrate at all, that’s when I started to panic," she said.
Alysha had stopped by Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and the Philippines before making it out to Indonesia - specifically the party island of Gili Trawangan.
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However, when her travelling companion realised she might have come down with something a little worse than a hangover, it proved to be one of the absolute worst places to be.
She said: "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 or anything. I was on a very small island, there wasn’t really healthcare, it was just really unlucky that I was there at the time.”
Thankfully, a doctor visited the poorly tourist on Gili Trawangan; testing her blood and discovering she'd caught a severe bacterial infection.
"I thought I was going to die, to be honest. It was that bad, I was literally like ‘this is it,'" Alysha went on to share.
"I was so annoyed as I was so close to the end of my trip. I’d been ill before, but not that ill before.
"I was really worried about telling my family – I didn’t tell them, actually, because they were having a lot of stress at work at the time. I didn’t tell them until after I’d been poorly."
For the first six days, she couldn't stomach any food or water as her body was rejecting everything, describing 'extreme' sickness and diarrhoea.
Eventually, doctors realised she had typhoid. The bacterial infection kills more than 100,000 people every year, and Alysha didn't even know that's what she was dealing with.
She was subsequently placed on a drip for the next six days in a small medical shack, but after returning a negative typhoid test, she was booted out of the country as her travel visa was about to expire.
"They took me off the drip and the next day I had to fly to Bangkok. I still was very sick, the flight was horrific," she recalled.
"Even the next few days in Bangkok were very difficult, I couldn’t do anything. The lasting effects of it were still a couple of weeks of not feeling quite right."
How might Alysha have caught typhoid?
Typhoid is spread by eating contaminated food or drinking contaminated water, and Alysha has two theories as to how she caught it.
Alysha said: "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."
She also thinks not washing her hands, particularly after petting stray cats, may have caused the illness.
She said: "I was in the middle of nowhere petting stray animals and then going about my day for hours and hours without access to water to wash my hands in, I didn't bring any sanitiser either.
The NHS provides typhoid vaccines, in both injection and tablet form, which last for three years.
Dan Seddon