If you are a Canadian with Canadian travel insurance then you want to read this. When your traveling abroad keep in mind it is the unexpected situations we encounter that throw a wrench in to things that cause our vacation travel or business travel to take a bad turn. getting sick or injured is never something we expect or take into consideration. I can't imagine anything worse than being stuck in a place other than home when sick or injured. Below is a story I ran into while doing some research on travel problems abroad.
Feeling tired, Andrew Malleson told his wife he wasn't up to attending the lecture on medical ethics. He told her to go alone; he would rest on the bed in their Prague hotel room until she returned.
When he awoke, the room was spinning. Dr. Malleson made it to the bathroom, where he vomited blood. Then he crawled to the bedroom telephone, grasped the receiver and called the front desk for an ambulance.
"For a while, I was lying on the floor, thinking 'It's strange dying in a hotel in Prague. I wouldn't have imagined that,' " said Dr. Malleson, 77, who is now recuperating at his Toronto home. "I was quite sure this was the end of me."
By the time his wife, Donna Stewart, returned to their room, her husband was unconscious and awash in blood. Two ambulances, including a resuscitation unit, arrived around the same time to take the retired psychiatrist to hospital. There, doctors searched for the source of his bleeding.
Being in the Czech Republic with a life-threatening illness was frightening enough. What greatly added to the burden of the Sept. 23 emergency, Dr. Stewart said, was the insurance carrier Sun Life Financial Inc. and its service provider Europ Assistance USA.
For three weeks, Dr. Stewart would be embroiled in e-mails and telephone calls about her husband's health, at times smuggling her BlackBerry into the intensive-care unit to communicate with the insurer.
