Emergency Facebook Post Helped Save These American Travelers’ Lives

While in Bali, Michael Lythcott and Stacey Eno were involved in a serious scooter accident.

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Michael Lythcott has been traveling all over the world, meeting people and making friends along the way. He mostly keeps up with these people via social media. When Lythcott and a traveling companion were involved in a scooter wreck that sent them off an embankment into a ravine, that digital circle of friends may have saved their lives, reports CNN. 

The 36-year-old American ex-pat living in Lisbon, Portugal, usually posts about his globetrotting adventures on Facebook, but on Aug. 22, he posted, “Help. In danger. Call police.” Lythcott and traveling companion Stacey Eno, whom he had met while traveling in Thailand in February, were driving a scooter in Ubud on the Indonesia island of Bali when they went around a turn and over the ravine. When he came to, Lythcott told CNN, it was dark, and he could tell his helmet and glasses were gone, and his back felt “half broken.” He called out to Eno, who said she couldn’t move and thought she was hurt badly.

Eno remembered he had his American phone, turned it on, surprisingly got signal, and posted his SOS.

“I saw Mikey’s post just a minute or two after it went up,” said Aimee Sparks, according to CNN. The two traveled together in 2014. “I work remotely and tend to have Facebook open while I work. I saw it and of course was startled and a bit surprised… I worried that he had been drugged or kidnapped or something.”

Sparks ended up calling Lythcott and talking to him. She asked Lythcott to send her a pin drop. Friends from around the world joined together to get local authorities all the information they could in order to save Lythcott and Eno. Once saved, Lythcott had “surgery on his skull to fix a fracture, then his wrist, which was broken, then his abdomen to fix a perforation and then had chest tubes inserted to inflate lungs,” according to CNN. Meanwhile, Eno fractured both of her cheekbones as well as her nose and left wrist in the accident and something split her tongue.

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