Diabetic Brisbane woman stranded in the Philippines fears running out of vital medical supplies

Three Queensland women, one with a potentially life-threatening condition, have been sleeping at an airport and trying for days to get home but flights keep getting cancelled.

A QUEENSLAND woman trapped in the Philippines could is worried she could go into a life-threatening coma if she can’t get a flight home soon.
Molly Pitkin, 20, Natalie Grosch, 29, and Philadelphia Rodgers, 21, were due to fly home from the Philippines on March 15 but every flight they booked got cancelled, leaving them stranded and sleeping outside the Mancu-Cebu International Airport for the past few days.

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Miss Pitkin, of Ipswich, is a Type 1 diabetic and although she said she packed triple the amount of insulin she needed for her holiday, she would run out within days if the remaining few international flights out of the country were also cancelled.

Philadelphia Rodgers, Natalie Grosch and Molly Pitkin have been stranded at an airport in the Philippines for days. Molly is a Type 1 diabetic and is starting to get concerned she won’t get home before her medical supplies run out.

“I’m fully trapped,” she told The Courier-Mail via WhatsApp call.

“I could go into a diabetic coma, which means at least hospitalisation for about a week.”
Miss Picton said an insulin pump was attached to a permanent cannula in her arm so insulin could be administered every few days.
“There’s two ways to administer insulin. One is way through a pump which I have,” she said.
“But without a pump you have can use needles but you need to change the needle tips every single time, which I have been doing.
“I don’t have any needles tips left and you can’t re-use a needle.”

Miss Pitkin said since being stranded she had visited chemists and medical centres in Cebu but no one was able to provide needle tips or had the right products for the pump.
Slacks Creek resident Miss Rodgers, Miss Grosch of Woolloongabba and Miss Picton, who worked together at Vodafone, and said they had gone on a short holiday to Siargao Island from on March 8.
They made it off the island just hours before it went under lockdown.
A GoFundMe called “Trapped in the Philippines” has now been set up with a goal of raising $5000 to help get them home after the thousands of dollars they had to outlay – and then lost – through having to book new flights that were then cancelled.
“One of us also has type 1 diabetes and requires medication to be able to survive. Without it she will die. We have limited access to vital medical resources for her,” Miss Grosch wrote on the GoFundMe.

Three Brisbane women are stranded at an airport in the Philippines.

“We have rebooked flights to get out of the Philippines three times now and have spent over $5000 to do so. If we don’t make it on our flight on Thursday there is a good chance the Philippines Government will be shutting down all flights domestic and internationally.”
Miss Pitkin said she had done the right thing by taking additional medication and supplies with her and paying for extra travel insurance for the pre-existing condition.
“I have two to three weeks of insulin left but it’s no good unless I can administer it,” she said.
Miss Pitkin said when she rang Cover-more she was told they would only assist her if she was deemed a medical emergency as they did not cover flights cancelled due to a pandemic.
“What an emergency would like for me is me going to a third world country’s hospital that’s virtually non-existent to administer a drug they don’t have,” she said.

“If that coma I went in didn’t kill me then, later on I could have eye, blood vessel damage, which would impact my ability to drive, my sight all that kind of stuff.
“They were willing to get to that point before they did anything.”

The three women and two Coolangatta residents – 29-year-olds Ben Jones and Jasmine Stewart – made it off Siargao Island just hours before it went under lockdown but have been sleeping at the Mactan-Cebu International Airport in Cebu ever since.
A government-imposed curfew implemented on Tuesday meant the five were not even permitted to stay inside the airport between 10pm and 5am.

Miss Grosch said they have waited in airport queues for literally hours while also trying to rebook flights online.

The three women, who have borrowed money from a family member in order to book a Cathy Pacific flight still scheduled to leave Thursday night, said any of they would not be able to receive refunds for the cancelled flights for weeks and in one case, Jetstar would only issue a travel voucher.
A spokeswoman for Cover-More said she could not share details about individual cases due to privacy constraints.
“However, our emergency medical teams are currently dealing with a very high number of cases involving Australian travellers overseas and we will continue to offer our customers all the help we can,” she said in a written statement.
Besides the curfew, the Governor of the Province of Cebu has also imposed a 30 day mitigation period in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, also known as COVID-19.