Testimonials

A Graduation Trip Ends in the Emergency Room

Eileen Shirk was heading down a highway in Acapulco, Mexico, with a jeep full of friends when she saw the headlights of a tanker truck dead ahead. The next thing the 22-year-old remembers, she was waking up in the emergency room surrounded by people she couldn't understand.

"When they took me into surgery, I was frightened and didn't know what was going on," she remembers. "I thought, what if I don't fall asleep? I can't speak Spanish, and I won't be able to tell them I'm awake."

Back home in Toledo, Ohio, Eileen's mother was just as frightened when she received a call from the mother of one of Eileen's Penn State University sorority sisters. She learned that Eileen had been hurt in a car accident, but there were few details. "It was very scary," Mary Alice says of her daughter's situation. "I don't speak Spanish, and I knew that I wasn't going to be able to make contact with anyone in Mexico."

To make matters worse, Eileen's father was out of the country in China. His secretary reached him and told him to call home. "The best part of the story is that I had just bought a MedjetAssist membership about five months before," Tom Shirk says in retrospect. "I own my own business, and I knew I had some insurance through the company, but they would never send me anything to define my coverage. So I went ahead and joined the MedjetAssist program."

Tom phoned his wife to give her the MedjetAssist toll-free phone number. From that point on, Mary Alice was able to focus on finding a receiving doctor in Toledo. Tom started making his way back home. MedjetAssist took care of the rest.

"MedjetAssist kept calling to give me updates," Mary Alice says. "My gosh, I don't know how I would have ever gotten her home without them. People ask me why I didn't go get her myself, and I tell them I couldn't have done her any good there. I don't speak Spanish, and we knew she couldn't come back on a commercial airline. Another guy who was injured had insurance that would only take him to the nearest trauma center, and he ended up in Houston for a week. The fact that MedjetAssist would take her where we wanted was pretty impressive."

Tom agrees, "I couldn't believe it. MedjetAssist told us their estimated arrival time would be one hour and twenty minutes, and the jet landed within two minutes of that time. We were so emotional to see her because she was hurt so badly. The MedjetAssist crew took her right to the hospital. It was bed-to-bed service."

In addition to having been unconscious for a period of time, Eileen had a broken clavicle, six broken ribs, a crushed left shoulder and broken right arm - and her back was broken, a diagnosis that had been overlooked at the hospital in Mexico. "Fortunately her spinal cord hadn't been damaged, but she had crushed vertebrae. If she had stayed in Mexico, there might have been permanent damage," Tom says. "I view MedjetAssist as somewhat of a miracle."

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