This post became so long that I decided it need to have a picture to make it more interesting. Unfortunately, I didn't have a camera on my trip so I decided to go with this picture from a good 10-13 years ago that has nothing to do with this post other than it is a picture of me and a plane. I never even got into the plane above. I could further explain the picture, but if you thought about it for a few seconds you'd realize that you don't really care - you're just reading this to find out about the medical emergency. On with the story...
On one of my recent trips to Philadelphia (Yes, I've been there multiple times over the past 3 weeks), my flight had to make an emergency landing in Pittsburgh, PA. You might notice that those cities are in the same state, so you know that the emergency couldn't wait.
I managed to get stuck near the back of the plane with very little room once the person in front of me reclined their chair, but managed to squeeze my laptop onto my lap to watch a movie on it. There was an in flight movie, but I had already seen it on another flight and there is only so much Ice Age a guy can take. The one nice thing about my seat was being next to the window. I love the window seats. Putting things away and getting up to allow someone else to get out to uses the restroom is slightly annoying to me. Once I'm in my seat, I'm there for the entire flight 98.5% of the time on flights 7 hours or less.
Frantically running down the isle came a flight attendant. He was nearly yelling, so I would have heard him asking, "Is anyone a doctor?!" even if I hadn't noticed the blur of his blue uniform streak past my row. A hand shot up, earphones came off, and a man in [I'd guess] his 50s or 60s sitting a few rows behind me stood and walked with the flight attendant as the situation was explained to him at an auction style pace. All this immediately got everyone's attention and, like gophers peaking from their holes, we looked around to figure out the reason for this inquiry.
It wasn't hard to find the focal point of the unfolding drama. Hearing the explanation as the flight attendant explained it to the doctor as they passed my row did help me know what to look for, but I couldn't have missed the big wad of napkins being held to the forehead of a man about five rows up on the right side of the plane (I was on the left). The man's head was tilted backward and a flight attendant, who had been serving drinks from a cart, was tending to the man with the a fore mentioned napkins.
Apparently, a "jerk", as I later heard him referred to by multiple people, wouldn't wait for the service cart to get out of the way and decided to reach around it and open an overhead bin to get something out. Unfortunately for the victim, a laptop of unknown ownership (I don't know who's it was anyway) was poorly stowed and toppled out. An edge of the laptop collided with the victim's forehead causing an injury which released the red bodily fluid commonly known as blood in the English language.
The doctor attended to the victim for a while, then returned to his seat after instructing the victim and the flight crew that the victim should not go to sleep the remainder of the flight and should seek further medical attention after landing.
At this point you are probably trying to anticipate what caused the emergency medical landing. You may be thinking, "Perhaps the man fell asleep and couldn't be aroused" or "Maybe he had a seizure" or "Maybe the man assaulted the 'jerk' in retaliation." You'd be completely wrong. The medical emergency that caused the landing had nothing to do with a laptop paying an uninvited visit to someone's forehead.
About thirty minutes later the same blue streak went by, retrieved the doctor, and led him to another passenger in distress. This time a man was sweating and feeling faint. I never got more detail than that about what the problem was, so I can only tell you what I saw and heard - a medical kit, a request for clean cloth and alcohol, an IV was setup, a woman walking back to the bathroom with blood on her hands (probably related to the IV).
Over the intercom, the pilot told us that we'd be landing in Pittsburgh due to a medical emergency and the plane immediately began descending. It was the quickest decent and landing I've ever seen. Even taxiing to the gate was fast. Emergency crews were ready to go when we got there, boarding the plane as soon as we stopped. Four men, two from the fire crew and two from the ambulance, assisted in carrying off the faint passenger. I didn't notice the earlier victim being removed from the plane, so I think he stuck it out until the flight made it to Philadelphia. After refueling in Pittsburgh, we were off again.
When we originally took off the pilot told us that he expected us to land early, but after the emergency landing we ended up coming in a bit late. It wasn't too bad though - I had a very interesting flight and still made it to my final destination, eh.
A few months earlier I had another interesting flight on which a man was warned by a flight attendant that he was very, very close to being arrested, but that is whole different story and not quite as interesting.
