Texas Nurse Sarah Danh Speaks Out After Coma in Japan on Honeymoon

Three months ago, Sarah Danh was on the honeymoon of her dreams in Tokyo. One day in, she was unconscious in a Japanese hospital, her liver and kidneys shutting down. The 27-year-old San Antonio nurse has now shared her first public account of what happened. She says she doesn’t remember living through any of it.

Danh and her husband, Luke Gradl, landed in Tokyo on April 8, days after their March wedding. By the next night, she was in an ambulance.

She’d been feeling off before the trip. Feverish, achy, convinced it was Covid even after she tested negative. A doctor sent her off with Tylenol, fluids, and instructions to enjoy the honeymoon anyway. Nobody caught what was actually building, according to her account posted to Instagram.

Then the flight over made things worse

Danh was so weak from vomiting on the way to Japan that she could barely make it through customs. She figured a night’s sleep would fix it. It didn’t.

By that night she was confused, combative, slurring words that made no sense. Her skin turned yellow. Her husband got her to St. Luke’s Hospital, where doctors diagnosed acute liver failure and hepatic encephalopathy, brain swelling caused by a liver too damaged to filter toxins from the blood. Her ammonia levels were dangerously high. She slipped into a coma.

A flight home, still unconscious

Doctors in Japan ran her through continuous renal therapy, dialysis, blood transfusions, and plasma exchanges to try to stabilize her enough to travel. On April 21, still comatose, she was flown back to San Antonio on a medical evacuation flight arranged in part through her employer, HCA Healthcare.

She wasn’t out of danger yet. Doctors told her family she had severe brain damage. She might never wake up. If she did, she might not be herself again. She woke up anyway.

What she doesn’t remember

Danh has no memory of any of it: the collapse, the flight, the weeks in a Japanese ICU. What she knows now, she’s pieced together from her family and her own recovery.

“I have absolutely no memory of any of it,” she wrote in her Instagram post. She’s since had to relearn how to walk.

A GoFundMe set up while she was still in Japan raised more than $187,000 before her family took it down. Danh credits it with getting her home at all.

Medical evacuations like Danh’s can run into six figures, and plenty of travel insurance policies don’t actually cover them. Worth checking before the next international trip, not after.