'˜They were restaining her using cable ties' - Mum's desperate bid to get daughter home to Leeds

Karleena Gomersall, 31, suffers from schizophrenia and was hospitalised in the country five weeks ago after becoming unwell.

Now her desperate family, appalled at the “barbaric” conditions she is being kept in, are frantically trying to fund a doctor and nurse to escort her back to Leeds.

“I just want to get her home,” said her mum Grace Wheeler, from the Little London area.

“She’s scared. Where she is staying is like an asylum from the olden days.

“This is not helping her get any better. I just want to get her home so she can get better properly. This is only adding to her illness.”

Karleena, from Hyde Park, went on holiday with her mum to Hurghada in Egypt on September 27.

She was diagnosed with schizophrenia three years ago but had seemed to be managing well until several days into the holiday. It later emerged she had left her medication at home.

Miss Wheeler contacted the British Embassy when she became increasingly unwell and Karleena was admitted to a private hospital nearby.

But, her mum says, the conditions she was being kept in were so appalling she had to take her out and hire an ambulance to transport her to a public hospital in Cairo, six hour’s drive away.

“I wasn’t happy with how she was being treated - they were restraining her using cable ties and rope,” said the 47-year-old mum of four. “She was locked in an apartment by herself, with nurses just taking her food in.

“She seems a little better now, but it’s archaic. It’s very run down. There are iron gates on the ward, and the beds seem like something out of an old-fashioned orphanage.”

Although the conditions in Cairo are better, Miss Wheeler says the problem now is in trying to get her daughter home.

Karleena had told her family she had travel insurance but they can find no record of it and it will cost £5,000 to pay for a doctor and a nurse to escort her on the flight home.

A crowdfunding page has now been set up to try and raise £7,000 to pay for this and the costs of being by her daughter’s side for the past five weeks.

“People keep asking me questions I can’t understand,” said Miss Wheeler. “They just want lots of money all the time.

“I just want to get her home. It’s like I’m numb. It was my other daughter’s 16th birthday last week. That was really hard and I just spent most of the day crying.

“I’m trying to take each day as it comes. Take it hour by hour. If I try to look any further forward it becomes overwhelming.

“I just need to get Karleena home.”

To contribute to the fund to bring Karleena home visit www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/gracewheeler