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Doctor In The House? Why, Yes...

Mighty_Emperor

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Gran's heart attack on jet with medics


A grandmother who suffered a heart attack on a plane could not have wished for better care.

When the stewardess put out the call: "Is there a doctor on the plane", 15 cardiologists stood up to help 67-year-old Dorothy Fletcher.

The doctors were en route to Orlando for a heart conference.

Mrs Fletcher, who comes from Liverpool, was on the flight to go to her daughter's wedding in Florida.

"The doctors were wonderful. They saved my life," she said.

"I was in a very bad way and they all rushed to help.

"My daughter was with me and you can imagine how she felt when all these doctors stood up.

"I wish I could thank them but I have no idea who they were, other than that they were going to a conference in Orlando."

Mrs Fletcher spent two days in intensive care at the Charlotte Medical Centre in North Carolina after the heart attack on 7 November.

She then spent three days on a normal ward, but still managed to attend daughter Christine's wedding.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/merseyside/3359149.stm

See also:

http://www.news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2360257

http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/5022404.shtml

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_851339.html

Emps
 
I heard this on my radio Walkman when out in town and may have caused some alarm by laughing out loud.

I like the way she says they 'almost certainly' saved her life!
 
(Excerpted from "The Luck Of The Devil" thread)

... I used to run a B and B. It was just a small one and wasn't always full, pre internet just a sign in the front garden, but I was surprised at the number of coincidences. Mostly trivial things but just enough to feel that the guests who'd rolled in on spec were somehow meant to be there. ...

There was the time when after reading a novel I was wondering what it would really be like to live through an earthquake ... and the next guests to book in actually had, so could tell me. The time my son came crying in as he'd hurt his arm ..... just as I was booking in a guest from Sweden who announced he was a doctor. He examined him and advised it was broken, he made it comfortable and we got him to the A and E pronto!

Sollywos x
 
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The time my son came crying in as he'd hurt his arm ..... just as I was booking in a guest from Sweden who announced he was a doctor.
This is especially interesting as a few months ago a young doctor came to stay. In conversation i asked if he'd ever been in one of those situations on a plane or in a theatre where they ask if there's a doctor in the house....He reported several, including more than one on a flight and being at the scene of incident in the street before the paramedics arrived etc. It took me a few moments to realise and point out to him how extraordinary and improbable this was ...
 
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A physician passenger on an airline flight diagnosed and resolved what appeared to be another passenger's stroke. It turns out that the paralysis on one side of the victim's face was caused by pressure effects rather than a true stroke event.
Doc on plane diagnoses man's unusual condition midair

A few minutes after his flight reached cruising altitude, Dr. Alan Hunter responded to a flight attendant's call for a doctor on board. A passenger was having a stroke, or so it seemed, the attendant said. This was certainly urgent — a passenger having a stroke could be one reason for an emergency landing.

But the passenger, whose face was drooping on one side, wasn't having a stroke after all, Hunter determined. Rather, the passenger had an unusual yet typically temporary condition, resulting in part from pressure changes in the airplane. No emergency landing was needed, and with Hunter's help, the patient was soon feeling fine. ...

Hunter, who is an internal medicine doctor at Oregon Health & Science University, said he had never seen a case like this before. To alert other doctors about this condition, Hunter described the case in a report published Monday (Jan. 27) in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. ...

When Hunter responded to the call, the patient told Hunter that he'd had a sudden headache and pain and a sense of fullness in his ears, as well as slurred speech and drooling. But the case didn't look like a stroke, Hunter said. When people's faces droop on one side during a stroke, usually either the top or the bottom of the face is affected. In this case, the entire right side of the patient's face was drooping. And the patient was young and healthy looking, making stroke less likely, Hunter said. The patient also mentioned that he'd just recovered from a cold.

"Ultimately, it just made sense that it was a pressure-related phenomenon" rather than a stroke, Hunter said. ...

Because Hunter suspected that the patient's symptoms might be due to a clogged eustachian tube, he had the patient swallow a few times. He also gave the patient some extra oxygen. Within minutes, the patient was back to normal.

At the time, Hunter didn't know exactly what condition he had just treated. But after he got off the plane, he did some research and found something called facial barotrauma, a condition that seemed to fit the current case. Most often described in scuba divers coming up from the deep, facial barotrauma occurs when a patient experiences a drop in pressure, and a blocked eustachian tube reduces blood and oxygen flow to one of the facial nerves. In the case of a diver, that pressure drop occurs as the patient swims toward the surface and water pressure lessens; in the case of an airplane passenger, it happens as the plane rises and atmospheric pressure drops.

According to Hunter's research, this phenomenon happens only if the eustachian tube is somehow dysfunctional. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/in-flight-diagnosis-facial-barotrauma.html

==========================

Published letter (report) on the incident:

Annals of Internal Medicine
28 January 2020

Unilateral Facial Paralysis During an Airline Flight
Alan J. Hunter, MD

Background: A medical emergency during a commercial airline flight may require an unplanned landing, which disrupts travel plans and is expensive.

Objective: To alert clinicians to a condition that can mimic acute stroke but does not require an unplanned aircraft landing. ...

https://annals.org/aim/article-abstract/2759790/unilateral-facial-paralysis-during-airline-flight#
 
This woman traveller unexpectedly gave birth at 29 weeks in an airliner. Luckily, a family medicine physician and 3 neonatal nurses happened to be on board to stabilize the premature baby.
Nurses, doctor help ‘lucky’ mom who gave birth on flight

A doctor and a team of neonatal medical professionals were in the right place at the right time — helping a Utah woman deliver her baby onboard an hourslong flight to Hawaii.

Lavinia “Lavi” Mounga was traveling from Salt Lake City to Hawaii on April 28 for a family vacation when she gave birth to her son, Raymond, at just 29 weeks gestation.

Dr. Dale Glenn, a Hawaii Pacific Health family medicine physician, along with Lani Bamfield, Amanda Beeding and Mimi Ho — neonatal intensive care unit nurses from North Kansas City Hospital — were also on board. ...

With no special equipment for the preemie, the group got creative: they used shoelaces to cut and tie the umbilical cord and used a smartwatch to measure the baby’s heart rate. ...

Mounga has since been discharged, but baby Raymond will remain in the NICU until he’s ready to go home.

“It has been very overwhelming,” Mounga said. “I’m just so lucky that there were three NICU nurses and a doctor on the plane to help me, and help stabilize him and make sure he was ok for the duration of the flight.”

FULL STORY: https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-travel-health-oddities-f3a723af90498b8c16485b750c5d4756
 
So on the birth certificate it'll say "place of birth: in the cloud"?

Didn't pregnant women used to have to be less pregnant than this when they got on an airplane?
"Generally, commercial air travel before week 36 of pregnancy is considered safe if you have a healthy pregnancy." (From www.mayoclinic.org.)
I don't understand this advice from Mayo Clinic; 36 weeks is 9 months, isn't it? WTF! (so to speak :p)
 
Oh, damn, more questions keep popping into my head! (And no, I'm not drunk tonight or something.)

I assume the airline won't charge for an additional seat (or will it?).
Will the doctors have to charge for their services?
Will regular health insurance cover the charges?
Will travel insurance cover them?
Who will have to clean up after this?
What will be done with the afterbirth?
Was it a crowded flight?
Did people have to give up their seats to leave space for the woman to lay down and give birth?
How did the mother feel about giving birth without pain killers? (Besides feeling in pain.)

I think that should do it for me for tonight.
 
This woman traveller unexpectedly gave birth at 29 weeks in an airliner. Luckily, a family medicine physician and 3 neonatal nurses happened to be on board to stabilize the premature baby. ...
... Didn't pregnant women used to have to be less pregnant than this when they got on an airplane? ...
Update ... In this case it may be a moot point, because the woman claims she didn't know she was pregnant.
Mom who gave birth on flight didn’t know she was pregnant

Lavinia “Lavi” Mounga had no idea a baby was coming when she went into labor on a flight from her home in Utah to Honolulu last week.

“I just didn’t know I was pregnant, and then this guy just came out of nowhere,” Mounga said during a video interview with Hawaii Pacific Health.

The baby boy, Raymond Mounga, arrived early at just 29 weeks while mom was traveling to Hawaii for vacation with her family. ...

The child will have to stay in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit he is full term, about another 10 weeks, Mounga said.
FULL STORY: https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-travel-oddities-60fb385e93f1aa75d616bcc4db27a3b8
 
Again, :wtf: !!!

That's very pregnant to not know.
I hope she's okay.
When i was a kid, the woman in the maisonette opposite came over feeling really ill, five minutes after getting to our house she went in to labour with her second child, she had no idea she was pregnant, she gave birth, 5 minutes after the ambulance arrived at the hospital, to a baby girl.
 
Re: Doctor in the House?

When I was eleven years old I was a rear-seat passanger in a car that was involved in a crash on a back-road in the Scottish borders. Actually, looking at a map, I see that it was an 'A' road (A707), but in Scottish terms that means a narrow single carriageway, lined with trees and littered with potholes. :D

My parents (in the front seats) got broken and cracked ribs and whiplash as a result of their seatbelts, and since seatbelts weren't a rear-seat option back then I lost my two front teeth when my face hit the back of the front seat.

The very first vehicle to come upon the scene after the accident? A doctor and his family on their way north to Scotland on holiday. There wasn't a lot that he could do except check that none of us were worse off than we appeared; but he reassured my parents and stuck around until the ambulance arived.
 
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