Queensland-based blonde model Emily Gurr, who boasts a more than 116,000-strong army of Instagram fans, told the Australian News.com that she has been flown from Bali twice in need of emergency medical care, adding that but for comprehensive travel insurance, which she fortunately took out before both trips, she would have had to foot her eye-watering medical bills herself.
In the most recent incident several weeks ago, Gurr had her ankle severely injured after she was hit by a parking motorbike, as she was ‘walking to dinner, completely sober’.
‘He [motorbike rider] came up on the bike lane and lost control and his bike fell on my ankle and smashed it,’ Gurr detailed the experience, adding that she was subsequently misdiagnosed by local doctors with ‘a sprain’ and even had to pay a fee for the examination, since the doctor turned out to not be affiliated with an insurance company.
Only after the pain grew intolerable, worsening into ‘absolute agony’, did she contact her insurer, 1Cover, which arranged her business class flight back home to Australia, where X-rays revealed that she was actually in need of surgery.
‘I’ve got seven screws and a plate in my ankle at the moment’, she summed up.
This is not the first streak of the avid beach lover’s bad luck in Bali. Less than three years ago, the then 21-year-old came down with dengue fever, which she got from a mosquito bite about a week earlier in Vietnam.
She woke up one morning feeling extremely under the weather and initially blamed it on a bad hangover after a party the night before, but it grew worse with time.
'I felt awful, like a bus had hit me. I didn’t know what it was but by the night time it was excruciating,' she said.
After about 10 days in a local hospital, the call was made to evacuate Gurr out of Bali in light of her rapidly worsening condition.
Gurr was flown to Darwin for treatment, and her mother joined her there, also at the insurer’s expense.
This double run of ill luck has, ironically, made her stand out from her insurer’s client base, but hasn’t put her off the holiday island, where she is even set to move soon for work. ‘You can’t really live your life in fear’, she said.
‘I love it over there and there’s risks everywhere, it’s just about being careful’, adding that taking out a medical insurance may indeed prove vital.