My Bali hospital terror: Day we thought our baby might die | Brinley Duggan

Even if we had been able to secure a mercy flight home, we wouldn’t have been able to get on it, writes Brinley Duggan.

Delivering oxygen to our daughter when she was at the peak of her illness.

Wiping up a drip of blood off the browning and perspiring hospital floor I looked over to my partner and daughter and could hardly formulate a thought, let alone a sentence.

To the left of the droplet I had just wiped up – dripped out by the cannula incorrectly thrusted into my infant daughter’s foot – another smudge, apparently blood, but not belonging to any of us.

While the sanitary levels of one of Bali’s most reputable hospitals sticks quite firmly in my memory, it pales in comparison to the sound and feeling of our baby daughter gnashing her teeth together as we forced her to inhale ventolin.

About a day later we would be told our daughter had acute bacterial pneumonia, and even if we had been able to secure a mercy flight home, we wouldn’t have been able to get on it because her condition was too precarious.

I had to hold her arms, leg and head to get her to sit still while taking ventolin.

Having to watch your child in pain is one of the most difficult and horrible things imaginable. But doing it in another country, with no phone connection, in stifling temperatures, and with a language barrier is another thing altogether.

It was our daughter’s first overseas trip, my partner’s first trip to Bali, and my much-needed escape to the heat to relax after a stressful months of work.

In hindsight, the trip was more stressful than any day I’ve ever spent in the office.

Even now, looking at photos of our little girl curled up with an antibiotics drip in her leg and ventolin strapped to her face, the thought of it fills me with dread and regret.

Our baby first started to show signs of sickness as we boarded a flight from Darwin to Denpasar as she coughed and cried for the entire the trip.

But it was upon landing at Ngurah Rai we started to think this might be something more than your typical cough.

Standing in the line for customs our normally effervescent and bubbly child was a shell of herself, hardly able to keep her eyes open and falling asleep in my arms.

By the time we were through, we loaded into a car and within moments our daughter had fallen into a deep sleep.

Arriving at our beautiful villa was the most melancholic experience of our holiday – a refreshing pool became an afterthought as our baby quickly went from bad to worse, vomiting the moment her feet touched grass.

From there our trip was dedicated to keeping her healthy.

Instead of soaking in the sun, we immediately set out trying to locate a pharmacy to find something different to the astringent, cherry flavoured Panadol we had brought with us which seemed to be making her more ill.

We trekked from chemist to chemist, plotting our course using Wi-Fi in various cafes along the way. When we had no luck we decided to take her to the classic SOS emergency Bali “hospital” by the side of the road in Canggu.

As she lay on the dodgy trundle bed, a doctor prescribed ventolin which we tried to administer with little success as our daughter was petrified of the bizarre contraption that seemed to be sucking her soul from her body.

Following a big sleep back at the villa, her breaths became short and her ribs terrifyingly protruded with each gulp of air.

The withdrawn breaths got worse and, after a hurried video to a doctor friend back home, we organised a car to ferry us to the aforementioned Balinese hospital.

The trip was about 40 minutes, but it felt like an eternity as we watched our tiny child struggling for air.

My partner recently said to me she thought we might not be taking our daughter home from Bali, and it was during this car trip it felt like the stakes were at their highest.

After eventually making it to hospital the drama reached some sort of crescendo.

Our phones were close to flat, the hospital Wi-Fi did not work, the staff thought she might have Covid, our insurance company was not able to be contacted, the language barrier was difficult to navigate and we just wanted to be home.

When we were conveyed to the hurriedly constructed Covid emergency ward our daughter’s blood oxygen level was just 86 per cent.

The level rose slightly, we returned negative Covid tests and we were transferred to another isolation ward.

This ward had no Wi-Fi access whatsoever, my partner and I were not allowed to leave the ward, and we had no food.

For a day and a half day we could not eat – whether or not we could have given our daughter’s concerning condition is another story.

Eventually we were moved into the hospital proper – but within a couple of days the air conditioner broke and we were left to sweat it out for hours while our calls for assistance fell upon deaf ears.

After six days of antibiotics, physiotherapy and intensive healthcare we were finally given the all-clear to fly home – our week-long sojourn to Bali to recharge instead ageing us about a decade and leaving our daughter with a parent-imposed travel ban until age (at least) 10.