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Freak accident shows need for health cover
Tuesday, July 10, 2012 • Mark Peters
A MYSTERY illness that nearly killed East Coast longboarding legend Ian Procter has reinforced his faith in the necessity for travel health insurance.

Ian was canoe surfing down the face of a wave in Hawaii when he took a knock hard enough to crack his pelvis. What saw him rushed to hospital screaming in pain 24 hours later was not the result of one of Hanalei Bay’s bone-crushing waves, though, but something much smaller.

One week earlier, a loose surfboard gashed his leg and a tiny, tropical microbe got in. If it wasn’t for the crack in his pelvis caused by a knock to the hip, Ian might have been spared an extended stay of several months in Hawaii, an addiction to morphine and oxycontin he developed in the course of pain-control, a near-death experience after bleeding out following an operation, and the need to remain hooked up to a Baxter bag which continuously dripped medication into his system to kill the bug.

The trouble with the micro-organism, surgeons told him, was that once it gets inside bone it likes to reproduce there.

Doctors were unable to identify the bug. They told Ian he could lose his leg . . . or his life.

Luckily, he had travel insurance.

“In the land of the free, if you have no health insurance, you’re out on the street. Health insurance is vital. People say ‘I’ve been overseas. I just don’t bother with health insurance’. I say ‘for $100 you could save your leg . . . or your life’.

“In some places overseas, amputation is the first option. If I had no insurance, we wouldn’t be talking right now.

“You think you value people and life, but until you’re knocking on death’s door things that should be really important to you don’t excite you like they once did. Everything you value — people and life itself — can be taken away from you.

“These little bugs don’t care how fit you are. They don’t care who you are, or who you think you are. The crack in my pelvis was not good. What was more serious was the bug which got into the crack in the bone. Surgeons had to cut out part of my leg to make sure it had gone.

“Now I’ve got through that, I look at every day like I’ve won Lotto. You dream of becoming a Lotto millionaire but I’m a multimillionaire in terms of friends and family.

“I value people more now. This is my blessing.”
OF MICROBES AND MEN: East Coast longboarder Ian Procter is on the road to recovery since a tropical micro-organism crawled into his bones after a canoe-surfing mishap in Hawaii. The near-death experience underlined his belief in the need for travel health insurance.
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