A tourist has warned others to be vigilant after a drink in Bali left her blind. She claims she only survived the ordeal because of access to top-notch medical care outside Indonesia.
American tourist Ashley King visited the tourist hotspot when she ordered a mixed vodka drink at a bar in Kuta in 2011.
The tourist, who was living in Australia at the time, told The Project on Sunday that she made the near-fatal mistake during her last night on the island paradise.
‘[It] It was no different than any other night I went out,” she said.
But over the next two days, while traveling to New Zealand, Mrs King began to feel ill.
“When I finally arrived at my accommodation, I went to bed and when I woke up the next morning I noticed that the light was very dim in the hostel,” she said.
‘Which I just attributed to cheap, hostile lighting. And about ten minutes later I couldn’t breathe and I was gasping for air.”
Ms King has shared her story more than a decade after it happened in the aftermath of the mass methanol poisoning in Laos that killed two Australian women and four others.
Ashley King (pictured), from America, ordered a mixed vodka drink in Bali in 2011, which left her with only two percent vision
The tourist said that by the time she was rushed to hospital, her eyesight had deteriorated and she felt like she was “in the dark, blind.”
‘It was something like that [the doctors] had not seen them before, and it was a bit of a mystery for them to figure out what was wrong,” she said.
Ms King said medical staff eventually discovered she had a large amount of methanol in her body.
She said the New Zealand hospital called her parents and told them to get on the next available flight into the country because her chances of survival were not good.
Despite being lucky enough to survive the ordeal, Mrs. King is still living with its aftermath thirteen years later.
She was left with just two percent of her sight and said it was the “most traumatic and most difficult” thing she has ever experienced.
The tourist said she had to learn to function as a blind person and said that “getting a disability is really difficult.”
Ms King said she sympathized with the families of Australian women Bianca Jones and Holly Bowles who died in Laos after drinking alcohol shots laced with methanol.
Ms King (pictured) told The Project on Sunday evening that the only reason she survived the methanol poisoning was because by the time she became seriously unwell she was in New Zealand and receiving treatment.
The American believes she is only alive because she drank the methanol last night and was treated by ‘a first-class hospital’ by the time she became acutely unwell.
But Mrs. King’s ordeal in Bali was not the only one in 2011.
In eerily similar circumstances to Ms King, Jamie Johnston, who was 25 at the time, was on holiday to Bali from her hometown in Newcastle when she ingested a cocktail containing methanol on her last night on the island on September 20.
The 25-year-old temporarily lost her sight and suffered brain damage and kidney failure. She spent weeks in intensive care in Indonesia and at home in Darwin. The Sydney Morning Herald reported at the time.
The nurse and her mother had ordered a jug of arak, a popular rice wine mixed with fruit juice, from the Happy Cafe restaurant on Lombok.
It was six weeks before Ms Johnston could talk again and in late 2011 she spoke to The Newcastle Herald Australian travelers warn of the dangers of methanol poisoning in Bali.
“Don’t drink anything that isn’t in a bottle or doesn’t have a lid on it,” she said.
‘Stay away from local rice wine. What happened to me could happen to anyone.”
The drink Arak was also blamed for the deaths of eight locals in Bali in 2010 and as many as 25 people in 2009, including four foreign tourists on the island.