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dbratt@trinidad.net
Doctor on board
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Is there a doctor on board?
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It’s happening more and more frequently.
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It’s not easy being a doctor on board.
“Is
there a doctor on board?” When one is on a flight and
just beginning to relax, no medical professional likes to
hear this.
It’s happening more and more frequently, about one
in every 160 international flights. The rise reflects an
increase in the number of people travelling, especially
older persons and people with medical problems.
The only time it happened to me, I was on a BWIA (remember
them?) flight from Piarco to London. We were four hours
out of Barbados, about 1 am local time and my wife woke
me up to say that one of the flight attendants who knew
me was asking for help with an emergency in the back of
the plane.
Groggy, sleepy and not in the best of moods, I struggled
out past outstretched legs, handbags and assorted packages
and heads, into the cold, stale twilight darkness of a sleeping
plane travelling at 500 mph at 36,000 feet, wondering why
I had ever gone into medicine and hoping vaguely that the
emergency was a child, a birth even, I could handle that.
It wasn’t. An elderly Englishman had collapsed in one
of the bathrooms, cut his head and was having his blood
pressure taken by the very competent BWIA flight attendant.
Luckily there was another doctor already present, a Trinidadian
GP, resident in the UK, and so was the elderly gentleman’s
calm wife. Among the four of us, with me hovering helpfully
in the background offering paediatric hints, we worked out
that, one, the cut was superficial, a scratch really, head
cuts bleed like pigs; two, his vital signs (pulse, blood
pressure, respiratory rate, temperature and level of consciousness)
were normal and stable, three, that he was a healthy man
and, four, that he had taken a sleeping pill and a scotch
and soda about two hours before going to the bathroom because
“the old fool couldn’t sleep” according to
the wife, who by this time had realised that nothing was
probably going to happen to her now remorseful husband.
A short conference in the galley with the head flight attendant
and the co-pilot ensued and we were able to save BWIA several
tens of thousands of dollars by not having to divert the
flight to Bermuda or some such other unimaginable place
for further medical treatment.
Of course it sounds easy now but as I recall, we both spent
the rest of the flight taking the gentleman’s pulse
every fifteen minutes in case we were wrong for, by now,
the tablet and scotch had kicked in and we could not keep
him awake. I’m not sure who was more upset, the wife
or us.
The BWIA crew were superb. They kept our spirits up and
supplied us liberally with coffee, blankets, pillows and
jokey comments.
Not so the medical ground staff at Heathrow. The plane had
hardly landed when we were invaded by their medical team
who obviously had nothing better to do that morning and
shoved and by-passed both me and the GP in their eagerness
to get to the patient and before we could report, had stretchered
him off the plane to the dismay of both he and his wife.
The last we saw of them was the wife’s flustered goodbye
wave to both of us.
But we were lucky. Hear what happened to another Trini doctor:
“the emergency I had last year on my way up to London
was when this gentleman started fitting and I heard that
dreaded announcement “is there a doctor on board?”
I did basically nothing apart from check his vital signs
and I couldn’t even put him in the recovery position,
not like you do anything for seizures anyways unless they
go on for long. A flight attendant had to help me lift him
up so we could at least move him to an area that had more
access in terms of space. It was highly embarrassing with
everyone staring at me and “suckin dey teeth cuz dey
vex” when we had to turn right around to head back
to Piarco.”
It’s not only the airlines that get upset when a plane
has to be diverted.
British Airways estimates that it has between 40 and 50
serious emergencies that require a plane to be diverted
each year. The most serious probably occurred when an orthopaedic
surgeon had to operate on a woman suffering from a collapsed
lung with a coat hanger, a plastic bottle and a roll of
Sellotape on board a flight from Hong Kong to London.
Last month another friend had the nightmare experience of
the co-pilot going mad on an Air Canada flight, wanting
to talk to God and she had to advise they make an emergency
landing in Shannon, Ireland.
The cost in extra fuel, staff wages, landing fees and disruption
to everyone’s schedules as well as the effect on an
airline’s reputation are considerable.
It’s not easy being a doctor on board.
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