There are two fantasies I have when flying. One, is that the pilots have collapsed, the request goes out for someone to fly the plane and, after volunteering (all the other passengers have gone down with food poisoning, hence why the task falls to me), I land safely, to wild applause.
The other is that someone has fallen ill (not the passengers with food poisoning – they are on a different flight), the request goes out for a doctor, and I save the person’s life.
I have never had a flying lesson or an atom of medical training in my life, by the way; but a girl can dream.
So, there I was in 2C, having missed out on my favourite row one, which had been taken. When the doors were closed, I noted that no one was in row one so asked if I could move to 1A by the window (and no one next to me – heaven!) and, as the seats were the same price, was allowed to do so. By the way, I’m not mentioning the flight or the airline, to protect the identities of others.
The captain appeared to ask for my boarding pass. Dear lord! I was going to be arrested. The crew explained that I had just moved seats, so all was well with the world. It turned out that the person seated next to the emergency door where I now was had expressed the need for assistance, which is forbidden. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘I’ll be able to save everyone.’
Be careful what you wish for.
Doors close. Engines start up. Then, right in front of me, a woman is on her knees. She says she is about to faint, and the crew ensconce her in 1C, and ask whether she is fit to fly, as the engines have started and once we’re off, we’re really off, and there’ll be no turning back for her, dead or not (well, I suspect they didn’t say the last bit, but I was getting their drift).
To me, she was not fit enough to fly. She started to sweat profusely, then went into a kind of shaking tremor where I could see she had lost consciousness. Fainting, or a heart attack?
I summoned up the zero amount of medical training I have and started to fan her profusely with the inflight magazine.
The man she was with didn’t know what to do; the crew didn’t know what to do. She asked for oxygen as she was having trouble breathing, but that wasn’t possible while we were taxiing (apparently). So, it was I who was the oxygen giver with one hand and using the other to comfort her.
We took off on time, but the woman was sweating even more. The crew provided her with water, and the sweat gradually subsided. The crew suggested she might need sugar and offered her a Twix. And a Kit Kat. ‘I can’t have anything with biscuit in it,’ she said. So, they gave her a Snickers bar.
Hang on! A Snickers bar – with peanuts in it? How are they even allowed on planes these days, given how many people on board suffer peanut allergies? Maybe I had a hitherto undisclosed one and was about to die? I just kept praying that the woman didn’t have one, too, in addition to her biscuit intolerance, otherwise we were going to be in deep doggy doo. Maybe there’d be two dead bodies in the front row.
Sometimes, I feel I overthink things.
Everything calmed down briefly and I joked to an Italian crew member that it was lucky I had medical training. My knowledge of Italian is a hair’s breadth better than my flying and mid-air CPR abilities, so let’s just say a lot got lost in translation. Especially the funny part.
‘You’re a doctor!’ squealed the crew guy, all but handing me an emergency kit. ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Not a doctor! Only wishing I was.’
It transpired that this flight was his sixth and last that day, so small wonder he had been keen to get the plane away.
What followed was very odd. The man and sick woman appeared to have some sort of domestic. He was sitting in 2D, so having to lean across and from behind when speaking, and as a result I heard pretty much everything.
He was asking her if she wanted to go back (bit late now, mate) and then tried to find out what made her happy (Snickers bars, definitely). She was quite non-committal but appeared to be in a sulk about something that went way beyond illness.
Now, my imagination went into overdrive. Had it all been an act to garner attention from him? Even when he gave her a kiss on the forehead, she was not placated.
Maybe it was just an act to get herself moved from her cheap seat the back to the prime real estate that had been exclusively mine.
Perhaps she did it for the Snickers bar.
Or, in my worst scenario, had she been kidnapped and engineered a move to the front where she could hope at relay the message that she was being held captive? I looked around for a piece of paper and a pen so that I could write ‘Are you being held against your will?’
I asked her if she needed a doctor when we landed. She didn’t.
I asked her if she wanted a large brandy, which pretty much sums up the extent of my medical training. She didn’t, mumbled something about drinking – or not drinking, I have no idea as I’d lost interest by then.
I ate my sandwich, drank my rosé, and then prepared for landing.
It was a very bumpy descent, at which the sick woman went into panic mode once more.
Don’t care now, love. Shove another Snickers down your throat; you’ll be fine.
Now get me off this effing jet.
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