A Kiwi expat who smashed her pelvis while hiking in a US desert has had surgery to repair the injury but says her stomach is in knots due to worries about medical bills.
Claire Nelson was forced to drink her own urine to fight dehydration as she lay in agony for three days after falling seven metres from a boulder in California's Joshua Tree National Park before she was rescued on Friday last week (local time).
She is now recovering in hospital in Palm Springs.
While the 35-year-old freelance writer and copy editor is grateful to be alive and for the "amazing skilled physicians and nurses" treating her, "the payment side of things, however, is a whole other story", she said in a tweet posted this morning.
"Having insurance is more of a polite buffer than total cover. There are no set costs for treatments. No general quotation. Nobody can tell me what the price of my CT Scan is, for instance. For that reason it becomes a scary healing process."