What Actually Goes Down When You Get Sick on a Plane
From paging a doctor to radioing one on the ground, airlines have ways of coping with illness. But none of them are ideal.
It was a moment straight out of a movie. Cyrus Komer, MD, was flying on Delta Airlines from Boston to Vancouver, Canada, on a ski vacation, when a flight attendant asked a question over the PA system: “Is there a doctor onboard?” Komer, a physician specializing in internal medicine, who had never before been confronted with an in-flight medical situation, hesitated. “I had to think about it,” he says. “I worried about trying to help someone without any of the tools with me that I normally relied on.”
But when that no one else came forward, Komer stepped up, and was brought to a passenger in business class who was lying back in his fully reclined chair, alert, but clearly upset and struggling for breath. After learning the patient had a history of a slightly weak heart and had just eaten, Komer guessed at a snap diagnosis: A slight shortage of oxygen brought on by a combination of the lower oxygen levels in planes at altitude, the high salt levels of airline food, and lying flat in a way that along with his weak heart allowed fluid to accumulate in his lungs, all compounded by a panic attack. Komer sat the patient up and…
