It’s your worst nightmare.
You’re 35,000 feet up in the air and suddenly you feel like you are about to die.
This is no panic attack, because you knew you weren’t right before you got on the
plane.
You start seeing double and have excruciating pain in your head.
Suddenly you just fall forward in your seat, your forehead making a direct impact with
the tray of hearty Hungarian goulash you couldn’t eat.
The passenger next to you is more than concerned.
He stands and shouts, “Is there a doctor on board?
This man is seriously ill.”
It turns out there is, but a PhD in European medieval literature is no good to you.
This is the worst place to be dying and no one knows what to do with you.
You certainly aren’t as fortunate as the person we are about to tell you about.
It’s June 1995 and two doctors are waiting to board British Airways Flight 032 from Hong
Kong to London.
Their names are Angus Wallace, who is the head of the department of orthopedic surgery
at Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham, England, and Tom Wong, a resident practitioner at a
hospital in Scotland.
Those guys, being doctors, made the flight on time.
That can’t be said for a 39-year old Scottish woman named Paula Dixon.
She had to get on that flight because she’d missed the one before.
This had been a terrible day for her.
She’d realized she might miss her first flight and so drove like a bat out of hell
on her motorcycle to the airport.
That led to a crash and there was no way she’d make her flight.
Thus she ended up with the doctors on flight 032, which was kind of lucky because if she’d
made the first flight she’d no doubt have not made it through the day.
As Paula got into her seat on the plane she was pretty beaten up and looked distressed.
She told the cabin staff that she’d had an accident and her arm hurt.
Well, she was in luck, because sitting on the fight were those two doctors.
They soon took a quick look at her.
Again, the doctors returned
to Paula’s seat, both thinking that she had merely bruised her ribs in the crash.
After a quick examination they knew she had actually broken quite a few ribs, and they
were well aware of how painful that is.
Fortunately there was a strong narcotic pain relief medication on the plane and so they
gave her that.
At that moment both doctors became aware that they had an emergency on their hands because
the woman began to have problems breathing, serious problems.
She was now in a lot of trouble, and the doctors knew what was up.
Her symptoms showed that one of her cracked ribs had punctured her lung and the air that
escaped was forming a bubble in her chest.
It was a condition called pneumothorax and if left untreated it is deadly.
This was now a life or death situation in the skies over India and those sitting nearby
were all in this drama now.
The doctors thought about asking the pilot to land the plane at the nearest airport,
but the problem with that was the change in air pressure might kill Paula.
Then again, if they just left her both her lungs might collapse and she’d die.
The escaped air from the collapsed lung could compress the other lung and soon Paula would
not be able to breathe at all.
There was nothing else they could do.
They had to perform surgery there and then.
But how to perform surgery without any surgical tools?
The doctors thought on their feet and started asking people in the cabin what they had in
their hand luggage.
A scalpel was likely out of the question, but something had to be useful.
One thing they did have was lidocaine, which is a local anesthetic.
But what they really needed to release that trapped air was a tube that they could stick
into her chest.
They found a tube in the medical kit but that was a urinary catheter, the kind that goes
through the eye of a man’s penis and into his bladder.
They couldn’t do the surgery with that because it just wasn’t strong enough.
Getting through a man’s Johnson is not the same as getting through the muscles in the
chest.
Wallace then found a coat-hanger which he used to thread through the catheter.
It was now reinforced.
It essentially became something called a “trocar”, which is an instrument to draw fluid from
a body cavity.
Wallace then disinfected that tube, but all he could find at the time was 5-star Courvoisier
cognac to do the job.
They used the lidocaine to stop the pain and pushed that thing through Paula’s chest.
To stop air from getting into the other end of the tube, the doctors made a one-way valve.
They did this by threading a small piece of oxygen-mask tubing through a hole in the cap
of a half-filled bottle of water.
Now they had to insert the tube, and so Wallace made an incision in Paula’s chest.
They didn’t have clamps for this procedure so Wong was responsible for keeping the incision
open.
He didn’t do this with his fingers, but with a knife and fork…sterilized with cognac.
Oh, and what a relief it was for Paula once that pressure was no longer in her chest and
she could breathe again.
In fact, after that ten-minute operation she had something to eat and then watched a movie.
Wallace later received an award from the British government for his actions in the air, but
the doctor spoke out about the lack of on-board medical equipment on planes in Britain.
He said the USA was even worse, and airlines over there had virtually nothing on board
of use to doctors.
We don’t know much about what happened to Paula after that, but she had an easy recovery
in hospital.
When asked about Wallace and Wong, she said, “These two big heroes saved my life.
They really excelled themselves considering the equipment they had.″
Wallace went on to become renowned in the realms of sports medicine, and was best known
for fixing the broken feet of soccer star Wayne Rooney.
Let’s stick with excitement in the skies and give you these two amazing stories.
Have a look at “Crazy Rescue Mission of Hijacked Airplane - Operation Entebbe” or
“What Happens When You Hide in the Landing Gear of a Plane.”