The bride who went into a coma during her honeymoon in Japan has spoken out for the first time since she was airlifted back to the U.S. in a terrifying medical emergency.
Sarah Danh, 27, was hospitalized April 9 on the second day of her trip to Japan with her new husband, 28-year-old Luke Gradl, after she suffered acute liver failure and fell into a coma, according to a previous GoFundMe for the newlyweds.
She was kept in critical care for two weeks overseas before she took an emergency medical evacuation flight back to her home state of Texas, where she and Gradl landed 20 hours later on April 21, as first reported by People.
Danh, who was still in a coma when she arrived back to the U.S., was diagnosed with “severe bilateral brain damage,” according to People, and doctors warned her family that she might never wake up again.
However, she began to breathe on her own days later and was taken off life support. She was transferred to a Houston hospital in May, where she began physical and cognitive therapy.
In her first post on Instagram since a video of her wedding shared in March, Danh broke her silence with an emotional Instagram post July 9, according to People. Her account has since been made private.
“First things first… I’m alive,” Danh, a San Antonio nurse, wrote in a message alongside pictures and videos from the hospital.
“It feels bittersweet to finally be sitting here, able to tell this story myself,” she said. Danh went on to thank her doctors, her family and those who donated to her GoFundMe, which surpassed $187,000 before it was deactivated.
She explained in the post that she had felt sick in the days before her flight to Japan, but that she had been “convinced it was Covid.” She went to the local emergency room, but Danh said no blood work was done and nothing had seemed out of the ordinary. She said the doctor told her to “get some rest, stay hydrated, rotate Tylenol and Ibuprofen for your fever… and have fun in Japan.”
Danh said she does not remember anything from the trip to Tokyo.
“I have absolutely no memory of any of it,” Danh wrote. “Apparently I was already so weak from throwing up the whole flight that I could barely walk and could barely get through customs. Supposedly I decided to stay in and rest, convinced I’d wake up the next morning feeling better and finally be able to enjoy our honeymoon.”
She continued: “SIKE. That night everything changed. I became combative, lethargic, started speaking complete nonsense, and, according to everyone around me, turned yellow like a minion. An ambulance took me to St. Luke’s Hospital, where I was diagnosed with acute liver failure, hepatic encephalopathy, and critically elevated ammonia levels.”
Doctors told Gradl and Danh’s mother, who traveled to Japan after her daughter was hospitalized, that they could not perform liver transplants on non-citizens, which meant that she needed to become stable “enough to survive the flight” back to Texas to have the surgery.
Once she was back in America, Danh said doctors began to focus on her brain injury that was caused by her liver damage, which led a neurologist to tell her family that, if she survived, she “would never be the same” and “would likely never walk or talk again and would require lifelong care.”
Then, as Danh wrote, “something incredible happened.”
“My liver slowly began healing itself,” she wrote. “The swelling in my brain started going down.”
She woke up April 29, writing, “It honestly feels like I came back from the dead.”
“Recovery didn’t end there – not even close,” she said. “I’m still recovering every single day. I now have more specialists than I can count and continue with neuro rehabilitation.”
Danh said that the cause of her sudden and extreme health decline is still a mystery.
“This experience changed me,” she wrote. “It taught me how unbelievably fragile life is. It taught me that tomorrow is never promised. It taught me to love louder, forgive quicker, and appreciate the ordinary moments we so often take for granted. And most importantly… it taught me that miracles do happen.”