You Can Go Home Again, But Why Would You Want To?

Part I: Flying the Friendly Skies

August and summer's last hurrah, a trip to North Carolina to see my father and his wife, Weyburn. EK met me en route, accompanied by her adorable Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Rory, and the three of us flew together from Chicago to Raleigh.

When Bob travels on business, and I ask him how his flight went, he usually answers with a single word. Uneventful. Let me just begin by saying my trip to North Carolina was not uneventful.

The first clue came before we’d even left the gate in San Diego when the pilot announced that storms were rolling through the Chicago area, causing a “ground stop” at O’Hare. As a result, we wouldn’t be leaving San Diego for another hour. I wondered if EK had already taken off from Sacramento, but within a few minutes she text-messaged me to say her departure also had been delayed. So I kicked back and struck up a conversation with my seatmate, a vacationing Italian accountant. Eventually, we took off and everyone settled in with their books and headphones.

About an hour later, a woman a few rows in front of us suddenly broke into our quiet flight routines. “Sir!" she began shouting. "Wake up, sir!” She was standing in the aisle, next to her empty seat, and bending over a man in the middle seat. “Sir! Sir!” And then, looking around at row after row of startled faces. “Is there a doctor on the plane?”

For the next 15 minutes or so, my new Italian friend and I watched in stunned silence as a full-blown medical emergency unfolded around us. “I need some oxygen here,” the woman was broadcasting to the flight attendants, who started bustling up and down the aisle, opening overhead compartments and breaking out a series of navy blue medical bags. The woman in the aisle kept shouting. “I can’t find a pulse. I think we’re going to have to defib him. Let’s go, people, we need to move.”

The unconscious passenger must have heard this even through his stupor, because he came around just for a moment, prompting his rescuer to change tactics. “We need to start an i.v.,” she announced. “I’m a nurse. I can do it.”

By this time, another woman had come to her aid, presumably answering the call for a doctor. But unlike the nurse she didn't seem to have a clue what to do for the patient beyond re-checking his pulse and looking worried. Fortunately a second doctor came rushing up from first class and took over, much to the visible relief of the pulse-checker. "I'm a dermatologist," she apologized and then hurried back to her seat.

"Let's move him so we can lay him down," the first-class doc suggested. The nurse agreed. “I need some men here,” she shouted. Several guys jumped up to help, but the aisle was so narrow and our victim so wide that only a couple of them could really get hold of him, which made it all the harder for them to squeeze his considerable dead weight to the back of the plane where they laid him out on the floor between the lavatories and the food service units. Within seconds, the doctor, the nurse and at least three flight attendants were swarming around the poor guy, opening his shirt, unzipping his pants, pulling out medical equipment and making phone calls. Soon, one of the pilots came back to check out the situation.

My new Italian friend and I conferred. Both of us expected we’d have to land somewhere short of Chicago to offload the patient. Instead, the pilot returned to the cockpit, acknowledged a medical emergency on board but noted that "things are looking positive for our customer," making it possible for us to continue on to Chicago. He then thanked us for our patience and signed off with a cheery, “You hang on back there, Jesse!”

By the time we landed in Chicago, the doctor had returned to first class, and Jesse was propped up in a back-row seat, a la Weekend at Bernie’s, conscious but tethered to an i.v. bag hanging from the overhead compartment, his personal Florence Nightingale still by his side.

Let this be a lesson to us all. If ever you feel the need to lapse into unconsciousness at 35,000 feet, do be sure there’s a crackerjack nurse seated right next to you. Or at least someone who plays one on t.v.

Next: Korean kids and Raleigh rednecks