A nine-year-old girl who was playing in a hotel swimming pool in Cambodia has been left permanently scarred after suffering an electric shock.
Jade Miller was at a resort in Siem Reap when she knelt on some electric wiring that knocked her unconscious, Metro reports. The shock left the girl paralyzed from the neck down, interrupted her heartbeat, damaged her cardiac muscles, burned her left leg and disrupted her ability to see or talk.
Miller’s parents, Meredith, 48 and Simon, 59, spent around $27,000 to fly her from Siem Reap to a hospital in Bangkok, Thailand, in order to take her to pediatric cardiologists. Staff at the Golden Temple Hotel, where Miller had her shock, claim that she only suffered burns due to a lamp’s heat, but doctors say she experienced an electric shock.
The girl was born in the United States but now lives in Chiang Mai with her parents, but has dual UK/US citizenship, as her father is a builder from Bristol. Miller was on a holiday with her parents and some family friends in July 2017 when the accident happened.
Meredith relates feeling a jolt of electricity when she rushed to carry her daughter away from the pool. She was taken to the Royal Angkor International Hospital, where doctors advised that the girl needed to be flown to the Bangkok Hospital Medical Centre.
They said that she was lucky to be alive and that the next 48 hours were critical,
Meredith said. “Her heart condition was so severe that they were unable at that point to carry out any treatment to her burns. It was appalling.” Golden Temple reportedly only paid for Miller’s first night in the hospital then refused to cover the rest of her medical expenses, which included a chartered airplane to Bangkok.
Miller spent around a week in the hospital then had to return three weeks later for skin grafts. She now has permanent scars on her back and stomach where skin had to be taken for grafting onto the burns on her legs.
Simon said, “We’re just happy she’s still with us – it really was touch and go at one point. She still has to speak to a psychologist once a week to get through the trauma.” He added, “We just want to make sure that people know about the lack of safety measures in these places. It really is abysmal. We don’t want anyone else to go through what we went through.”
