Dad, 35, dies on holiday in Sunny Beach, Bulgaria, 36 hours after stomach ache dismissed as food poisoning - what is Pancreatitis?

On January 3, Katerina Glazyrina and Andrejs Krievkalns, who both worked in advertising, were on holiday in Sunny Beach, Bulgaria, with their five-year-old daughter Lizzie when he complained of a stomach ache. They assumed it was food poisoning as Andrejs was otherwise in good health.

But the pain continued and spread to his back and soon he was in hospital in Burgas diagnosed with acute pancreatitis — a sudden inflammation of the pancreas which only leads to severe complications in one in five cases, and only a small percentage of those prove fatal, according to the NHS. Katerina said Andrejs told her not to worry and he would be “home soon”.

However, after she left the hospital, Andrejs’ condition caused multiple organ failure and he died on January 4. “When I heard the news I was alone,” Katerina told PA Real Life.

She said: “It was the hardest day of my life. I don’t know how I managed to get through it. We were preparing to return to normal life after the Christmas time. It’s like you went on holiday and you can never come back to the life you’ve been building together.”

Katerina hopes to raise awareness of the symptoms of pancreatitis, which include sudden severe pain in the centre of the abdomen which gets steadily worse and can then travel along your back, according to the NHS. She also hopes to encourage parents to take out life insurance.

Katerina, originally from Russia, met Latvian-born Andrejs in London in 2006 while they were both students. After seven years of friendship, their relationship evolved into love and they married at Hackney City Hall in 2013, before Lizzie was born in 2019.

Katerina and Andrejs had been in contact with life insurance brokers in 2024 and they were in the process of finding the right policy for life and critical illness insurance – but hadn’t completed the process before he died. After his death, Katerina’s local community in Hackney came together to raise money for her and her daughter, raising more than £12,500 through an online fundraiser on GoFundMe.

She said: “People are so willing to help me and my daughter, it melts my heart. It’s beautiful. I can only say thank you.”