My husband did something every Bali tourist does. Days later, he couldn’t recognise us and I’ve gone from being his wife to his carer overnight

It was Ash Benbow’s thirty-first trip to Bali – a destination close to her heart – and a particularly special trip, as it would likely mark the last overseas holiday with her mother, who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia.

‘My husband Drew, my mum, her support worker and I were all set to have a last hurrah,’ Ash, 39, from Bendigo, Victoria, tells the Daily Mail. 

Sadly, the trip would become unforgettable in the worst possible way. It wasn’t her mother’s health that would prove a problem – but her previously healthy husband’s.

‘The trip had been going well,’ Ash recalls. ‘We were at a beach club having a bite to eat when Drew, 45, suddenly began complaining of sore eyes.’

‘We’d put sunscreen on, and he assumed he must have got some in his eyes but, even after washing them out, the pain persisted.’

After a while, Drew became drowsy to the point of falling asleep mid-conversation.

‘I asked him how much he’d had to drink, but he’d literally had only two sips of a cocktail,’ Ash explains. ‘We knew something wasn’t right, so we went back to our hotel and Drew went to sleep.’

Over the following days, Drew’s condition worsened – first the sensitivity to light, which persisted, then crippling headaches that made it impossible for him to do anything but sleep in a darkened room.

‘I kept wanting to take him to a doctor, but Drew said he wanted to wait and see for a few days,’ says Ash.

‘He’s an anaesthetic nurse, so he’s got a lot of medical knowledge, and we thought he’d start to improve.’

When Drew also spiked a fever, the couple called the resort doctor, who said he believed Drew had been infected with dengue fever and began treatment.

When, five days later, Drew’s condition had only worsened, Ash insisted on hospital.

‘We had to call an ambulance to the hotel to take us to hospital, and I had to pay them AU$3,000 in cash so they’d take us. Once we arrived at the hospital, they wouldn’t take him unless I paid upfront again, so that was another $3,000, but thank God we paid it because by this point he was really sick, slipping in and out of consciousness and unable to be woken at times.’

Once he’d been admitted, doctors conducted a suite of tests and determined he was not suffering from dengue, but had tested positive for typhoid fever instead.

Typhoid fever is a serious, life-threatening bacterial infection caused by a specific type of bacteria called Salmonella typhi. While it belongs to the same family as the bacteria that cause ordinary food poisoning, typhoid is much more aggressive.

Once the bacteria enter the body, it doesn’t just stay in the gut but multiplies and spreads into the bloodstream, attacking multiple organs and causing severe, systemic illness. 

‘As a nurse, Drew was fully vaccinated, but he still contracted it,’ Ash says. ‘I’ve never felt terror like it’

Doctors in Bali began treating Drew with a number of different drugs, including high-dose steroids, which caused his face to swell, antibiotics, and opiates.

‘It felt like I didn’t always know what they were giving him or why, and he didn’t seem to be getting any better,’ says Ash, who returned to Drew’s bedside after getting dinner one evening to discover his oxygen saturation had dropped to 82 per cent, meaning he was suffering from significant respiratory distress. 

‘I’m not medically trained, but even I knew this was very serious,’ Ash says.

‘He’d had two litres of oxygen and it had only gone up to 86 per cent.’

Distraught, Ash emailed their travel insurance company, who sent an Australian travel doctor to Bali to oversee Drew’s treatment.

‘I’ve never felt terror like it, watching Drew struggle and not knowing if he was on the right course of treatment,’ she says.

‘Then, when the Australian doctor arrived, I’ve never felt such relief. He just explained everything and told me we needed to get Drew back home for treatment as soon as possible, or we might not be able to at all.’

This, as it turns out, was not straightforward.

‘He’d been having severe abdominal pain, and doctors suspected he could have a perforated bowel – which, thank goodness, he didn’t end up having – but at the time they told us there was a chance he might not make it through the six-hour flight alive,’ she says.

‘We had to decide if we were comfortable taking that risk. The Australian doctor told me that if we didn’t act now, he didn’t know if we’d even have the choice later on, so we decided to go ahead. It was the longest six hours of my life.’

After Drew’s medical evacuation flight, he was taken straight to hospital in Bendigo via ambulance, where he was received by the infectious diseases team.

Here, it was discovered Drew had not only meningitis – a secondary complication of the typhoid fever – but also leptospirosis, another deadly bacterial infection often spread by rats.

‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Ash says. ‘We are so careful with only drinking bottled water in Bali and sanitising our hands after touching money, and things like that.’ 

‘But as I did more research, I found out often it can be passed along by rats crawling along crates of soft drink cans while they’re in storage, and contaminating the rim that way, which could be how Drew got infected.’

Ash says the couple would often buy cans or bottles of soft drinks to enjoy by the pool and never suspected for a moment they could be a source of contamination. 

Leptospirosis is a notoriously sneaky and aggressive infection that can quickly progress from flu-like symptoms to multi-organ failure if left unchecked.

‘It now meant that Drew had been diagnosed with not one but three life-threatening conditions,’ says Ash.

Over the next two weeks, Drew remained in hospital, where his symptoms continued – and worrying new ones developed.

‘As well as the excruciating migraine-like headaches, Drew was having cognitive issues,’ says Ash.

‘First, it was not being able to remember certain people when they came to visit him – forgetting his daughter’s name – he has three children – or forgetting whole conversations minutes after they happened,’ she recalls.

To treat the agonising migraines, doctors performed two greater occipital nerve blocks – injections of local anaesthetic and steroids into the base of the skull.

‘They didn’t seem to provide much relief, and Drew was still sleeping up to 18 hours a day,’ says Ash.

Eventually, Drew stabilised enough to be discharged after Easter – but with no answers as to what his long-term prognosis would be.

‘We’ve had several admissions since, and Drew has also begun having absence seizures,’ Ash explains.

‘He’s been placed on two new epilepsy drugs, but doctors say it’s too soon to know if this will continue forever or if it’s something he’ll eventually recover from.’

‘Last week, his GP explained he had several complex things going on and he couldn’t see Drew recovering enough to work in the next 12 months.’

This has meant an incredible financial burden for the couple – who are still about $15,000 out of pocket for his treatment in Bali, while travel insurance has so far reimbursed only $2,300.

‘I’d just started a new job, and immediately had to ask for four weeks of leave, and now don’t know if or when I can return,’ Ash explains.

‘I can’t leave him alone because he can’t remember things like turning off the oven. I get three hours of respite a week from the hospital team, but it’s not enough for me to be able to go to work.’

‘It honestly feels like a nightmare,’ Ash says. ‘I just don’t know how to move forward or how we’re going to make it work.’

A GoFundMe set up by friends of the couple aims to help ease the financial burden during this time. At the time of publication it had raised $6,405 of the $30,000 goal.

‘If you know them, you know they are the first to show up for others,’ says family friend Tania Rhodes, who established the GoFundMe.

‘The kind of people who give, support, and never ask for anything in return. If you know them, you’ll know they would never ask for help themselves, so I’m doing so.’

Ash says the neurological side of Drew’s condition has been the ‘cruellest part’.

‘The infections nearly took his life, but the aftermath has stolen so much from him emotionally, mentally and physically. Watching such a proud, intelligent and independent man become upset because he can’t remember how to do basic things, losing track of conversations mid-sentence, asking the same questions repeatedly and being unable to trust his own mind anymore is absolutely heartbreaking.

‘Some days he struggles to find words, forgets conversations minutes later, still sleeps for hours from sheer neurological exhaustion or becomes overwhelmed by simple everyday tasks that once came naturally to him. 

‘The seizures, memory loss, confusion and cognitive changes have impacted every part of our lives. His vitals are still unstable at times, and the uncertainty around how much recovery is possible is something we carry every single day.’

Ash says she feels like she is grieving someone who is still here.

‘I’ve gone from being his wife to his carer overnight, and I just want him back,’ she says.

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