A Brit is stuck in a Thai hospital after falling ill while on a holiday with his friends – and cannot afford to get home.
Dean Penson, 41, fell sick in Phuket, an island on the southern tip of Thailand. It’s feared he could be suffering from leukaemia as friends say he has been bleeding from his eyes – and has needed over 20 transfusions.
Dean’s best friend Ben Page, 42, who has been with him during his stay at the hospital, says the conditions are “like the Gaza Strip”. They’ve kicked off a fundraiser to try and reach £10,000.
Ben said there is blood and needles strewn all over the ground. He said: “It’s pretty horrendous, the conditions are so bad. There’s blood everywhere, there’s needles everywhere.
“The way I would explain it to people is it’s like The Gaza Strip, but without so much rubble. It feels like the ‘third world’. There’s blood all over Dean’s bed. There has been blood on the cover since he got there. There’s no toilet roll, you just wash with a hose.”
He added the nurses have “messed up so many times”, causing blood to gush out of Dean when they pull needles out. “Three people have died next to him over the last three or four days and there are no curtains,” he added.
Mr Penson will need an estimated £9,750 to cover his medical bills and flight home. From Southend-on-Sea, he had flown out to Phuket for a break with a group of mates on November 6.
He began to fall unwell on November 15, with his friends taking him to hospital near the busy island’s old town four days later. Doctors found he had an extremely low blood count and had to have 20 transfusions over the first 10 days.
Ben, who briefly returned to the UK before coming back to be with his friend, said they suspect he may have leukaemia. He said: “He’s just got worse and worse, he’s really anaemic. We’ve been best mates since we were 15. It was just horrendous to see him like this. He couldn’t see well because he had a haemorrhage behind his eyes. That was causing him to bleed from them.
“His bloods are just so low, which could be leukaemia, but I’m not really sure. He’s had 18-20 bags of blood and platelets. His platelets are just totally depleted.”
Ben added the conditions at the hospital are “horrendous” and said “we wouldn’t treat an animal in a vets this way”. But he said that he still faced a startling hospital bill when he returned home, with little hope of being able to pay it off.
He said: “The hospital has so far charged around £5,000. He’s obviously run up a bill here that he can’t afford to pay. And he’s going to have to go A&E when he gets back. They are just pumping him full of blood at the moment in the hope that we can bring him home.”
