Welcome to a tale that will make you appreciate every safe journey you’ve ever had, and treasure the comforts of home like never before. This is the story of James Burke, a man whose holiday turned into a nightmare, and a family’s race against time.
Burke, a proud son of Limerick, found himself soaking up the vibrant culture and vivid sunsets of Thailand—a well-earned respite from the hustle and bustle of Irish life. As his adventure drew to a close, Burke, brimming with memories and stories to share, messaged his kin, “can’t wait to get home”, while weaving through Bangkok’s labyrinthine streets by taxi, en route to the airport on November 19. The Irish Independent picked up his story, charting a journey far weightier than his outbound flight.
But fate had a cruel twist in store; before he could soar above the clouds and back to the Emerald Isle, Burke’s health plummeted. Stricken by the stealthy predator known as type 2 Dengue, James crumpled, an unsuspecting warrior felled by the “breakbone fever”. Panic gripped his family as silence stretched across the continent; the effervescent holidaymaker had vanished without a word.
Days morphed into an agonizing blur, with hope ebbing away, until a thread of news came. From the staff at his hotel, word trickled through that Burke was not just unwell, but battling for his life inside a hospital’s sterile walls. The family’s relief at news of his whereabouts was was quickly shadowed by the grave nature of his condition.
A Thai translator painted a stark portrait of Burke’s plight, with medics fighting tooth and nail to draw him back from the brink—ventilator tubes, sepsis, and respiratory failure were now part of his lexicon. “He had acute kidney failure, pneumonia, a bleed on the brain and severe nerve damage,” revealed Margaret Creed, a warrior in her own right, standing tall among Burke’s eight siblings.
But tragedy does not merely strike a man; it ripples through a family. “We can’t afford to go out there because we’ve every penny of our savings given to the hospital; it’s costing €2,700 a day to keep James where he is,” confided Creed to the Cork 96 FM listeners. With the tap of savings turned off and travel insurance abandoning them—invalid after the tick of a clock at his hospital admission—hope dimmed.
In the throes of hardship, Burke clings to life in Bangkok’s intensive care, tenaciously gripping the threads of recovery. Though ventilation tubes no longer snake down his throat, the war rages on—as sepsis, brain bleed, and a fractured body demand their due.
The language of life and death knows no borders, but words can falter when they’re needed most. Creed laments that the barrier of tongues hinders her brother’s fight, each lost word a missed chance for healing.
Here, the plot takes an uplifting twist; the digital age brings together an army of warm hearts. A GoFundMe campaign blazes like a beacon through the fog of despair, its goal noble: to muster 176,000 euros for Burke’s besieged body and a sky chariot to bring him to the hearth of home. The rallying cry? “That is all we want for Christmas. If 100,000 people could give us 2 Euros (77 baht) each we could bring him home,” Creed implores.
As we part ways with this harrowing saga, let it be a stark reminder of dengue’s wrath—a pestilence that lurks in the innocuous brush of a mosquito’s wings, armed with fever, aches, and sinister bleeding. Though Burke’s odyssey has taken a dire turn, across oceans and screens, goodwill and generosity could write a different ending—one of homecoming and the triumph of community spirit.
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