The Patient Was…

Almost everybody has probably heard of the “mile-high club,” and I have personally qualified for membership on a number of occasions.

No, not that mile-high club!  

I’m referring to one that I’ve newly named, in which members comprise health care professionals who have been called upon to render medical care to airplane passengers or, rarely, crews while flying.

A report in the highly respected New England Journal of Medicine indicates that in-flight medical emergencies occur in about 1 per 604 flights. This works out to somewhere between 24 and 30 such events per one million passengers worldwide. In truth, this is probably an under-estimate because many minor instances are probably not reported.

Many physicians have never participated in an in-flight medical emergency; some haven’t flown or flown enough, others have been fortunate to be only on flights where no such events occurred, and still others have chosen not to respond to calls for in-flight assistance.

My own experience, by chance, has been unusually extensive; for a short while there was an in-flight call for assistance on every third or fourth flight I took, leading some colleagues not wanting to even travel with me. Fortunately, the frequency of personal encounters lessened, but because I was flying fairly often there were still a number of in-flight emergencies to which I responded.

The patients described here were all among those to whom I have rendered care while on commercial airline flights, both domestic and international. The experiences were widely different, and responses of the airline crews differed, as well.