Traveler Ashley King is ringing the alarm bells after a trip to Bali left her temporarily blind. A single drink almost cost her life when the traveler went to Asia in 2011.
While in Bali, King said that she had a single drink during her final night in the country. Shortly after drinking the cocktail, the traveler fell ill. It turns out that someone had laced the drink with methanol.
Initially, the 18-year-old didn't realize what danger she was in.
"Nothing felt different. I didn't feel any kind of differentness in like my feelings of like drunkness or the way my body was feeling," she told Inside Edition.
Traveler Issues Warning
However, her situation quickly changed. She became disoriented and exhausted as time wore on.
The traveler said, "When I woke up the next morning, the light was off and I thought that was a little funny. Like, why would someone turn my light off? And I went to the bathroom, and I noticed the lighting in the bathroom was also really dim."
She quickly realized that she was struggling to breathe and that she couldn't see properly. The traveler rushed to the ER where doctors diagnosed her with methanol poisoning.
"So what the doctors had to do was give me pure alcohol and get me drunk so that my body would stop metabolizing methanol," she explained. "But they had alcohol and orange juice and they told me that I had to drink it incredibly quickly, that they couldn't give it to me through an IV, but that I had to consume it. So, I would finish a drink and then they'd pour me another one, and then I'd finish a drink and they'd pour me another one. And they were encouraging me to drink it faster - it was like the most absurd drinking game I'd ever played."
She also continued, "But the drunker I got, the more I could breathe and the more I could see. I went from being in the dark, blind to being able to take in light again, to be able to see my doctors. My breathing went back to normal. But meanwhile they had called my family back in Canada and told them to get on the first flight to New Zealand because it was methanol poisoning and there was a very good chance that I wasn't going to make it."
