Jake Harvey remembers vividly the moment he was told in a Balinese hospital that he had just two hours to remove his father’s dead body from the intensive care ward.
He had just watched his father, Wayne, die, but within minutes he was told he had to “unplug” him – leaving him to work out how to remove a catheter and a tube that was still down his father’s throat.
“Straight away, they said you have got two hours to get him out of here,” he says. “I still had my hand on him.
“I unplugged him all. Pulled the hose out of his throat, I had to remove his catheter out of him too. We wrapped him up in the sheets and then sat there for a while, and then they organised [someone] to come and pick him up.”
“It was horrible. Fucking horrible.”
Wayne had quickly deteriorated at the Puri Raharja hospital in Denpasar in the days before his death on 7 January 2023.
The hospital was shockingly unhygienic; Jake had watched stray cats defecating in a ward and a surgeon with bloodied sleeves moving between patients. After arriving from Australia, Jake slept for two nights under a thatched roof in the hospital’s courtyard.
Wayne’s death certificate lists his cause of death as “non-contagious illness”. But Jake believes his father, who was just 69, died with septicaemia after his bowel was ruptured dur
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