A British woman has told of how she and her family thought they were being scammed when they picked up a call saying their father had been admitted to a Thai hospital - but that was just the beginning of their nightmare.

Dad-of-six Raymond Wallace, a 72-year-old retired lorry driver from Sidmouth in Devon, had been travelling around Thailand when he suddenly fell ill and checked himself into a hospital in the city of Hua Hin on February 14, having suffered from respiratory problems.

But within hours he was sedated and put on a ventilator as doctors scrambled to figure out what was wrong with him. 

His daughter Karrie has now told MailOnline how when her family was called at 5am by a Thai hospital clerk demanding payment for medical bills, they thought they were being conned. 

Karrie, a 40-year-old who works in healthcare and set up a GoFundMe page to help with her father's exorbitant medical bills, said her sister was the one to break the bad news to her. 

'I knew as soon as I saw her name flashing up on my phone at that time in the morning that something was seriously wrong. She’s not a disrespectful person who would be calling you at a stupid time for no reason', she told MailOnline. 

'I answered the phone and asked: "What’s going on?"

'Straight away she said "Dad’s in hospital in a really bad way".'

Karrie said her sister was put on FaceTime with Thai doctors at the Bangkok Hospital Hua Hin, who showed an unconscious Raymond lying in hospital with tubes coming out of his mouth. She added that there were black marking around it, too. 

The family was initially told by Thai doctors that Raymond, who Karrie said was 'fit and healthy with no pre-existing conditions', had pneumonia, but later changed their diagnosis to acute respiratory distress syndrome. 

But when they called the British embassy in Thailand, they were told that he may have been suffering from kidney problems, leaving them in the dark as to what Raymond was suffering from.  

Karrie said that because Raymond's travel insurance unexpectedly ran out before his hospital visit, the family is being charged more than £3,000 a day to look after Raymond, a bill that is expected to rise the longer Raymond stays in hospital. 

Doctors told her that if his condition worsens, he will be moved to a hospital in the country's capital, Bangkok.  

She and her brother are set to fly out this week to try to understand their father's situation better. 

'[The doctors] keep saying to us "oh we’re just going to keep him sedated for a couple of days to see if his vital signs improve. If they improve, we’re gonna try to wean him off the ventilator to see how well he responds to it."

'Or if he doesn't improve over those couple of days, they're going to transfer him to Bangkok Hospital and put him on a different type of ventilator. We haven’t even been given a proper picture in terms of when they’re thinking of doing it.

'At the moment, they’re saying he’s critically stable, and there’s been no change over the last 48 hours.' 

She said she has been worried sick since Saturday, and hasn't slept a wink.

'I obviously didn’t go back to sleep after that phone call. You feel like you don’t want to go to sleep because you don’t want to wake up to something you don’t want to hear', she admitted.  

As someone who works in the field of healthcare, she said she has been under a lot of pressure to explain what has been afflicting her father, which has compounded the stress she is under.

'When you’re telling someone else about it, it makes it very real. My mum made a comment, after she FaceTimed him, saying "he was black around the mouth and eyes", and she asked me what that was. 

'I was like "I don’t know", and then I was getting upset because [the question] was making it worse for me. I know obviously it shouldn’t be there, and then other people are now picking up on it. It’s not knowing or being able to answer anything or know where you are.'

Raymond had travelled to Asia three years after losing his partner Jane, Karrie's stepmother, to an unexpected brain tumour. 

While he had initially travelled with a friend to Goa in India, a favourite holiday spot for him and Jane, he decided to travel to Thailand after his pal convinced him. 

'We were all shocked to find out he was in Bangkok.  We found out when he arrived – he texted my brother and said: "Gone to Thailand with my friend – staying in a nice hotel",' she said. 

'We were quite shocked that he was leaving India, because Goa is the place where him and his partner used to go all the time. Maybe it was overwhelming for him to be there', Karrie added. 

Despite the fear, she said her family has been working tirelessly to get Raymond home. 

'We’re all in a WhatsApp group, everybody’s actively posting and trying to do stuff – someone's trying to contact the embassy, I've obviously set up the GoFundMe. Everybody’s literally just been so proactive, trying to think of things that we can do.

'The GoFundMe was obviously the last thing we wanted to do, we wanted to see if it was something we could keep to ourselves, but as soon as the bills started coming through we said ‘this is too much, we can’t do this on our own.’