**This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of BMO Insurance. All opinions are my own.
It was the last full day of my visit to Dubai a few years ago.
I was writing a travel story on Dubai for the Toronto Star, where I was the travel editor. I’d had breakfast at a fine, luxury hotel and was heading out to tour some of the old city, check out the markets and have a drink with a friend who was living in the UAE. I had no reason to expect anything would go wrong. But sometime in the early afternoon I began to experience stomach pains.
I chatted with my friend but skipped the drink. After a few minutes, I excused myself.
“I’m really quite sick,” I said. “I need to go back to my room.”
The famous Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai. JIM BYERS PHOTO
I took a cab back to my hotel, where I began to feel worse. After a half hour or so I called the front desk. They summoned a doctor, who gave me some medication he thought would help.
It didn’t. An hour or two later I was in the washroom, doubled over in pain. My stomach was on fire, with sharp, gasping pains. I called downstairs again and they summoned an ambulance.
“We’ll take you to the American hospital,” I remember one of the attendants saying.
I don’t recall much but I do remember being seen by a doctor and then trying to get to the washroom. At one point as I walked back to my gurney or bed (again, I can’t recall) I noticed I was trailing dots of blood on the floor.
I’m no doctor but that didn’t seem right. They ran some tests and I told them I had bitten into a sausage at breakfast that didn’t seem cooked all the way through.
I thought to myself, “Wow, I can see this happening at a food cart in some sketchy part of a big city, but this happened at a five-star hotel in a destination that’s very popular with visitors from around the world.”
My wife was scared to death and wanted to fly to see me. I convinced her that the hospital was quite good. And it was. I had excellent, attentive nurses (I especially liked the Irish one).
Chatting with locals at a mosque and learning about Islam was one of the highlghts of my trip to Dubai a few years ago. Getting sick? Not so much. JIM BYERS PHOTO
I watched the Ryder Cup golf tournament on a grainy television and read any newspaper I could find and started to get better after 24 hours.
On the third day they sent me back to a hotel (thankfully a different one) and told me to take it easy for two or three more days. I didn’t do much; just hung around and went for short walks to get my strength back. And, yes, I watched what I ate.
I was perfectly fine by the time I hopped on a plane and flew home. But it really got me thinking about how lucky I was to have had insurance. Had I not been covered, I would likely have had to pay thousands of dollars of my own money.
The modern hotels and skyscrapers of Dubai are fine, but I much preferred visiting mosques and more traditional buildings in the old part of the city. JIM BYERS PHOTO
Many of us think these things won’t happen when we’re on holiday. Or at home for that matter. But they do.
I’m not a worrier by nature. But neither am I getting any younger. For me, knowing I have good travel insurance is critical.
There’s really no excuse for not making sure you’re covered when you’re on the road. BMO Insurance offers annual travel medical plans that cover unlimited 10-day trips for $49 for folks aged 18-49 and for $59 if you’re 50-59. It’s only $92 for unlimited 23-days of coverage for people from 18-49 and $111 if you’re between 50 and 59. Folks older than that can get individual quotes.
For most people, if you took two 2-week vacations a year, your premiums amount to just over three dollars a day, so there’s really no reason for not making the effort.
