This woman went blind after a night out in Bali. She's warning other tourists about methanol in their drinks
Calgary woman Ashley King was blinded by methanol-tainted drinks 13 years ago
Ashley King went to a bar on a Bali vacation in 2011, and woke up blind just a few days later — a result of drinks spiked with methanol.
"I woke up in my hostel and I wasn't able to breathe. And shortly after I wasn't able to see," said King, a 32-year-old Calgary woman who is sharing her story in a new podcast called Static: A Party Girl's Memoir.
King was 19 at the time, on her last night in Bali before flying to New Zealand the next day. She was travelling solo but went out with friends she made on the trip. They visited a popular tourist bar listed in a Lonely Planet guide.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened that night, she thought, but a couple of days later she was rushed to hospital in New Zealand.
"My doctors did some tests and realized that there's a large amount of methanol in my system, and … I didn't even know what methanol was," she told The Current's Matt Galloway.
Methanol is a normal byproduct of the distillation process, routinely removed in regulated alcohol manufacturing. But illegal distillers may not pour off that methanol correctly, or even realize it needs to be removed.
According to Doctors Without Borders, that bootleg alcohol sometimes finds its way into the food system in lower-income countries as a cheaper alternative to brand-name booze. Business owners may buy it illegally to mix into cheap house cocktails, or refill bottles of well-known alcohol brands.
Anyone who comes off the plane from one of these countries could potentially be a methanol toxicity time bomb- Dr. Paul Gee
Dr. Paul Gee is one of the emergency physicians who treated King at Christchurch Hospital in New Zealand. He told The Current that drinking even a small amount of methanol is poisonous, as your body breaks it down first into formaldehyde, and then formic acid.
"Both of those agents are toxic to all cells and their metabolism," said Gee, explaining that the acid will first attack your eyes and brain, and then also the heart, lungs and kidneys.
Gee said King had already lost about 50 per cent of her vision by the time she got to hospital, while the level of acidity in her blood was making her "very, very sick … definitely in the range when fatalities start to occur."
"She was pretty close … [I'm] glad she got to us in time," he said.
This past November, six tourists died from suspected methanol poisoning in Laos, prompting Canadian officials to update travel advice for the country. Speaking to CBC Radio at the time, primary care physician Dr. Peter Lin said there could be "thousands and thousands of poisonings every year."
Doctors Without Borders has called methanol poisoning "a global public health issue that has too little focus."
While King survived the methanol poisoning, she did not recover her sight. She wrote a play about her experience and has now turned it into a podcast, in the hopes of raising awareness.
"It's still happening and it's taking lives … it makes me sad, but it also makes me angry," she said.
'A detective story'
King had been living in Australia on a gap year after high school, with plans to return to Canada for university. She had researched her holiday in Bali, but later remembered only a small reference to methanol poisoning in an online blog. It warned that some foreign tourists had gotten sick from homemade alcohol, but King took that to mean drinks served out of open containers on the street or at the beach.
"It didn't cross my mind that that would mean restaurants and bars," she said.
"When you're being served bottles that you're familiar with, you assume you're being served what they say. It never crossed my mind that these bottles would be refilled with tainted alcohol."
King was already feeling a little unwell the next day, Wednesday, but put it down to nerves about flying to New Zealand on the next leg of her solo trip.
By that Friday, she was in hospital with a team of doctors puzzling over her symptoms.
"It was a bit of a detective story to work out what was going on," said Gee. Methanol poisoning can initially feel like the normal effects of drinking alcohol, he explained, while victims often mistake feeling unwell later for a run-of-the-mill hangover.
In King's case, it took blood tests to identify the methanol levels in her system. Once doctors realized what was wrong, the treatment was unusual: they got her drunk.
Chugging screwdrivers in hospital
The ethanol in "normal alcohol" is easier to break down than methanol, Gee said, so the enzymes in your blood will work on that first. That gives doctors time to get the patient on dialysis, which safely removes the methanol, formaldehyde and formic acid from their system.
"We got some alcohol, mixed it up with orange juice and gave her a screwdriver. And she was moderately surprised," Gee said.
King remembers chugging those drinks and starting to breathe a little easier. Pretty soon, she was drunk enough that the situation didn't feel "that serious anymore," she said.
"Meanwhile, they were calling my family back in Canada and asking them to get on the first flight to New Zealand because there was a good chance I might not make it."
Gee said these cases crop up all the time, particularly as travel trends have changed and it's easier for tourists to reach more remote locations. He advises avoiding alcohol served from a jug or open container, as well as spirits where you can't see the drink being mixed or poured.
"Just stick to the known brands of bottled and canned beer, or [canned cocktails] that you're familiar with," he said.
Gee co-authored a medical paper about King's case, hoping it would help ER staff spot the symptoms faster.
"Anyone who comes off the plane from one of these countries could potentially be a methanol toxicity time bomb, if they get sick within 48 hours of arriving," he said.
The Canadian government's updated travel advice for Laos and methanol poisoning suggests avoiding "free or extremely low-priced drinks," and only buying "alcohol in sealed bottles and cans from reputable shops."
Living the life she always wanted
King spent a month in hospital as doctors tried in vain to restore her eyesight. She was left with about two per cent of her vision, and can now only see some shapes and shadows in a blurred, sepia tone — as if she's looking at everything through static.
"I don't see colour. I can't read or write. I obviously don't drive. I don't see depth," she said.
She said she decided not to seek police action against the bar because she didn't believe anything would come of it. Instead she returned to Canada, where she was no longer coming home to start university, but "to learn how to be a blind person," she said.
"I went through a lot of really, really, really hard years of adapting and wondering 'Why me?'" she said, adding that therapy and support from family and friends helped her through.
One of the dreams she initially gave up on was to become an actor and performer, thinking she couldn't do it as a blind person.
But over the past 13 years, she has travelled by herself again, she went snowboarding solo — and she wrote and performed in a play about what happened to help others avoid the same pitfall.
"Checking off those bucket list things, I was like, 'OK, I'm going to live the life that I thought I was going to live,'" she said.
"I'm just taking a really weird, roundabout way of getting there."
Audio produced by Allison Dempster.
