Perth boy Harry Lomax ruptures spleen in Cabo, Mexico as mum warns about travel insurance

An Australian couple has been left with a massive medical bill after their young son’s seemingly innocuous fall forced him to undergo emergency surgery at a Mexican hospital.

Seven-year-old Harry was walking in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, on February 5 with his father, Ryan Lomax, and two younger brothers when he took a “light fall” while jumping between concrete slabs and reeling.

While all seemed well at first, alarm bells began to ring for Harry’s mother, Danielle, when her seven-year-old son began to vomit and became dizzy, disoriented and pale.

Mr. and Mrs. Lomax took Harry to a hospital in Cabo, where a CT scan revealed that the fall had punctured his spleen and caused fluid to begin leaking into his abdomen.

The family moved to Mexico from Perth in March 2022 after Lomax left her career as a banker to start her own e-commerce website and work remotely.

Mrs Lomax described Harry as an energetic and active boy, and attributed his fall to “another slip”.

‘It was nothing out of the ordinary for him. He got up a bit out of breath and said he was fine and kept walking,” he said. news.com.au.

I took them home and after I got back from shopping, Harry was in bed throwing up, Ryan tried to help him go to the bathroom but he fell.

“I took one look at it and I knew something wasn’t right.”

Harry’s spleen was beyond repair and had leaked around 600ml of blood into his abdomen, prompting doctors to perform a 4.5-hour emergency splenectomy to remove the damaged organ.

The operation was a success and Harry spent the next six days in hospital, returning home on February 11.

“If we didn’t get him to the hospital in time, if his spleen continued to bleed into his body, he would have died,” Ms Lomax said.

Henry’s mother, Danielle Lomax (left), knew something was wrong when Henry began to turn pale and became dizzy and disoriented.

Harry is now on the mend after a harrowing few days in hospital.

“It all happened so fast and I was honestly praying that they would bring my baby to me because I didn’t think she was coming back.”

The spleen regulates the levels of platelets and red and white blood cells in someone’s body, and now that it has been removed, Harry is at a small risk of developing serious infections.

Ms. Lomax believed that the travel or trauma insurance they had purchased would cover the medical bills, however her travel policy had expired in December.

Your trauma insurance also deemed the accident not “traumatic” enough to cover you.

The Lomax family had to use a large portion of their life savings to personally cover medical bills, which quickly reached $25,000.

‘Do I regret not double checking my travel insurance renewal which I’m sure I did in December? Shit yeah! Can I change it? No,” Lomax wrote on Facebook.

Since then, he has used Harry’s experience as a warning to his fellow travelers to make sure their insurance is up to date and covers them.

‘If you are going to travel, have insurance. If you think so, check again. Maybe not,” she wrote.

TO GoFundMe was created for the family by parents at Harry’s old school in Perth, raising over $8,000 of their $15,000 goal in just two weeks.

A CT scan (pictured) revealed that his spleen had ruptured, and without immediate treatment and removal of the spleen, he could have lost his life.