My near death experience in Kota Kinabalu

During my trip to Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia I spent a day at a beautiful island called Sapi Island (read my post about my day). The end of the day, however, was not so great…

During my day at Sapi Island, I did a bit of snorkelling with a trained guide. At one point, the guide held a sea urchin in the palm of his hand which he then held out to me. In a moment of insanity, me Debbie the girl that is scared of basically all animals lol, decided to touch this black spiky creature! Unsurprisingly, I then proceeded to panic whilst under water and then try to swim away and for someone who can’t actually swim, this was a bit of a struggle (even with a life jacket lol). When I resurfaced, I kept my legs horizontal rather than vertical, to keep as much distance between me and the sea urchin as possible. Despite this, I still felt something scratch my leg.

I didn’t think too much of it until I was awoken in the middle of the night by intense abdominal pain. I can’t even begin to recall the number of times I had to go to the bathroom that night. You can probably guess what was going on in that bathroom; I’m not going to go into detail because it was just gross ?!

I was sitting on the bathroom floor in my friends house, in a foreign country half way across the world, throwing my guts up. That’s when I realised that the scratch from the sea urchin must have broken the skin and I had been poisoned… I was dying and all because of a tiny sea creature.

My life was literally flashing before my eyes. Whilst my friend and her parents were sleeping peacefully in their beds, I was in their bathroom having an emotional and physical breakdown.

Emotionally, I was a wreck; my thoughts were all over the place. One minute I was cussing my guide who had literally handed me death and the next minute I was hoping my mum wouldn’t blame my friend for what happened to me. Then I was back to cussing the guide lol and in the next minute I was crying over all the things in life I had yet to accomplish.

After a while I decided that I needed to wake my friend up so that she could take me to the hospital, but first I would Google it to see just how bad my situation was.

Errmm yeah so after doing a bit of research, I realised that I might have overreacted a bit. It seems that rather than being minutes away from death’s door, I had just eaten something that did not agree with me.

I don’t think there was anything wrong with the food. I think it was more that my stomach was not used to this type of food (unfortunately I have similar experiences on other travels). My friends (who are from Malaysia), ate the same food and were fine.

After sleeping most of the next day away, I was feeling considerably better. There was no way I was going to let this little bump in the road ruin my trip, so in the evening I was back at it again, eating more delicious food! ??