Siblings scramble to save brother
Alastair Geis lies in his hospital bed in Bangkok, immobilized from several injuries suffered after he was hit by a train while standing on a passenger loading platform.
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Updated: August 26, 2009 10:47 AM
A sibling member of the first triplets born in Kelowna in 1961 today finds himself lying in a Bangkok hospital bed suffering from multiple injuries caused when he was hit by a train on Aug. 14.
Alastair Geis, 48, was hit by the train while he was standing on a loading platform in a Bangkok suburb.
Among the injuries suffered by Geis from the collision are a broken jaw, partially torn liver, broken right arm, broken right leg, and bleeding issues inside both his skull and lungs.
His only means of communicating at the moment is by giving a thumbs-up sign due to his injuries.
Brenda Huber, Geis’s sister, said she has been desperately trying to get information on the status of her brother and how to address his health care costs.
“It has already cost about $3,000 alone for emergency abdomen surgery to deal with his liver,” said Huber, a Kelowna resident and trained nurse who teaches in the nursing program at UBC Okanagan.
Geis was on his second extended trip in southeast Asia, this time visiting Thailand and China while working as an English teacher.
He had no travel health insurance coverage, so that has left Huber, along with her brother Colin, who lives in Vancouver, and other family and friends scrambling to find ways to cover the health care costs for their brother and determine how soon he can be transported back to Canada.
“There will be about a four to six week recovery time for Al,” said Huber. “We are trying to seek some clarity on what the hospital is doing to treat him, what the cost will be for any further surgeries, and when can he be brought back home.”
She has contacted Canada embassy officials in Bangkok and solicited the aid of Kelowna-Lake Country MP Ron Cannan to seek answers to those questions.
The toughest question that Huber wants to address is what happens to her brother if there isn’t enough money to pay for treatments he needs. (See sidebar below.)
Huber, who described her brother as “an active, sporty type of guy,” said he has a friend in Bangkok who right now is the only conduit for getting information on their sibling’s condition as distance and language barriers are making communication a problem.
Finances are a concern, Huber says, because the family doesn’t have the financial resources to cover a multi-thousand dollar health care bill.
The possibility of a fundraiser to help with the effort may be in the works, but Huber said lack of information so far on what costs may lie ahead for her brother make that hard to organize at this point.
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