Is there a Doctor on the plane??

[Hoppinggreen]

I had an experience yesterday that was a bit "is there a Doctor on the plane?", although obviously not as impressive and I was wondering if anyone else has had similar, even if it was just something very minor, maybe a bit niche that you happened to know or can do.
I popped into our local petrol station to collect a parcel yesterday and there was a man holding a piece of paper and speaking to the attendant. As walked in the attendant looked at me and said I have no idea what he is saying he doesn't speak English, I don't suppose you know what he is saying do you?
The man turned to me and started speaking an EU language I speak very well.
Directions given, all sorted.
I am not talking about an actual Doctor on a plane situation here or anything lifesaving just a moment when someone said "I don't suppose you happen to know ............. do you?"

Anybody here who can do a cold start on an Admiralty Fresh Class Water Lighter?

I was on a boat trip out of Weymouth and as one does I was having a chat with the fireman as these things do the conversation turned to the merits of various grades of fuel oil - his verdict being the more unpleasant the better as modern stuff lacks high end punch.

Eventually he asked if I could mind the shop as I obviously knew something about this sort of kit - 2x Scotch Boilers and Wallsend/Howden oil fuel & forced draft while he went off for a quick break. I havnt been in charge of marine machinery for ages and it was lovely.

Sorry, just realised it was bought for their child! Duh!!

My friend died on a plane flying back from the US. There was no doctor on the plane.

We were at DC parents night a few months ago and the teacher had a lovely spreadsheet to show us exactly where our child was in their class for each topic and prelim etc. But they couldn’t get the spreadsheet to work.

DH is an accountant, so he fixed it.

Not quite as impressive as saving a life… lol

Mine is languages. Waiting for a bus on Oxford Street one afternoon and a tearful young German teenager, who spoke no English, came up to me to say he was lost, didn’t know what bus he needed to get back to where he was staying. I’m not sure why he approached me, but I do speak German, so I calmed him down, got the address off him and put him on the right bus.

The second one, waiting to see the asthma doctor with DD1. There was a Romanian family waiting with their DD, who spoke no English. They couldn’t find an interpreter, so I offered to help, which saved them having to come back another day.

She was choking on a singular watermelon seed? That’s a very odd scenario and quite hard to imagine how that could even happen considering how small watermelon seeds are.

my special skill/ perfect timing thing is that I have saved 4 different children from drowning and one adult. First one I was 7 and dived into a pool on holiday after an approx 18 month old fell into the pool on a holiday and sank like a stone, no parents around as I was waiting for my parents to go to dinner. I did a life guarding qualification as a teenager and it’s come in quite handy over the years!

DD (15) also seems to have this as she has saved two different people already!

I did a basic first aid course many, many moons ago. I was working in a high street shop at the time. One day a female customer was talking to a colleague, she was behaving really erratically and causing a bit of a scene. My colleague was very young and struggling to help her, so I took over, and got her a chair away from the main counter. I thought at first she was drunk, but as I was talking to her, trying to figure out what to do, I had a light bulb moment and asked her ‘are you diabetic?’. Turns out she was having a hypo, so I went up to the staff room and grabbed the Snickers I had stashed for my break. I sacrificed my Snickers for the greater good, and within 5 minutes of eating it she was much better. I offered to call an ambulance for her, but she’d gotten her wits about her, and after thanking me profusely, I got her to get a taxi home. I was teased for several years about my ‘emergency chocolate’ 😄

Ha ha I had a similar experience when the teacher friend I was on holiday with gave a group of school kids a telling off while in the Louvre. Don't know where their actual teacher was.

I am a doctor and fortunately there haven’t been any medical emergencies on planes I have been on. There was one on a train once, a guy travelling from an airport who had recently had surgery in Turkey. His abdominal surgical wound had ripped open and his intestines were literally falling out 😬 he was holding them in with his hands. I had to stop the train and get an ambulance to collect him from the train.

Less dramatically I was once on a small plane in the Caribbean and a French-speaking family got on and sat in the seats by the emergency exit. The English-speaking steward was trying to explain to them that they have to be ok to operate the emergency exit if they sit there. But he didn’t know a word of French and they didn’t know a word of English, and they were all getting in a panic. I managed to successfully translate for them even many years post A-level French (quite proud of myself 🤣) and I’ve never seen anyone as relieved as that steward 🤣🤣

At work one time, an SLT member approached me. "I tried to book the Polish interpreter for Mrs X...but they're not available..."

"Just as well. The X family isn't Polish. They're Latvian." [I frequently became exasperated by our SLT who seemed to think that anyone white with a non-western foreign surname was Polish.]

"Yes...well...The son suggested that we get you because the mother speaks Russian."

So the SLT member spoke English - which, it turned out, the mum understood (just her spoken English wasn't great). She answered in Russian. I translated into English and looked to the mum to check that I'd got it right. She nodded.

Then we conducted the rest of the meeting the same way.

I’ve been the doctor on the plane. Usually very little you can do tbh. Might get you to a hospital faster than an Ambulance in the UK these days though 🥹

I’m also often far to full of wine on a plane when I’m heading on vacation defo not safe to practice any medicine so I’m not sure I’ll ever be of any use!

Travelled to Australia last year with my whole family. DD1 is a doctor, and sure enough the woman in the seat behind us became unwell and DD1 had to attend to her.
A few days later we were in Adelaide's biggest shopping mall and DD1 and DD2 were in a clothes shop when a young man dropped to the floor and had a massive clonic tonic seizure! This time DD2 was in charge as she is a paediatric hospice nurse and deals with seizures every working day so is more experienced with epilepsy. They looked after him until the ambulance arrived :)

Nothing as important as a doctor on the plane but I’ve directed Italian and French 🇫🇷 tourists in my own city 🇬🇧 and my daughter gave instructions to Japanese 🇯🇵 tourists as she spoke just enough to help ( her partner is Japanese)

Long story but I was meant to be food shopping and got distracted on the way there, and diverted into town to buy makeup
On the way to the carpark I passed a shop I hadn't been in for ages and thought maybe I should pop in

Walked in the door and a man had just collapsed and stopped breathing. At the time I was an ambulance dispatcher so I called and started CPR. The crew arrived and as they put the monitor on he got a pulse back

I heard he was later discharged from hospital
Right place right time and I wasn't even meant to be there

Namechanged as this is very outing.

I’m a nurse, I witnessed a horrific car vs elderly pedestrian RTA whilst walking back from the shop on my lunch break so did what I could with what I had to hand. The poor woman’s foot was hanging on by her Achilles, her tibia and fibula had both snapped in half and were sticking up in the air 🫣 the driver was still in the car in shock, he literally couldn’t move so I took his tie off him and used it as a tourniquet.

It was absolutely freezing outside and the lady was losing so much blood that I ended up lying on the floor cuddling her to keep her warm and alive whilst waiting for emergency services. Was probably 5 minutes at most but felt like hours. Turned out she was related to one of my colleagues so I got to find out how she was doing. She survived and so did her foot!

Absolutely ran on adrenaline the whole time as I am wholeheartedly NOT a trauma nurse and don’t want to see any bones where they shouldn’t be 😟

Oh and my best friend had a hypo while we were on a fucking pedalo in the Mediterranean Sea, she started to get a bit shaky so checked on her sensor. Her sugars were scarily low so we couldn’t risk her pedalling any more and I couldn’t pedal hard enough for both of us so I made her lie down on the boat while I swam to shore to get some emergency snacks. Swam back with a bar of chocolate and bag of crisps. She was fine but if she’d died, I’ve have resuscitated her to kill her again myself because as a long-term diabetic and fellow nurse, she should have known better

Nowhere near as dramatic. We had joked about what dh who is a nurse would do if the call came while we are on a plane and it did. He followed several midwives to the patient to find that a paramedic was already taking charge of someone who appeared to ta combination of airsick and inebriated. He quite happily retreated from the scene

Reading these has just reminded me of a work one - I was quite new in a department comprised mostly of women. It was the day of the Christmas meal - they had decided to have a bring a dish thing, all a bit tame and odd. I had been at a meeting and got back just as it was starting, to hear the head of the department announcing that she had bought 3 bottles of wine for everyone to share. It was going to be a very small glass of wine each as there were about 25-30 of us in the department but she then made a big song and dance about being really sorry but she had forgot to bring a bottle opener so we wouldn't be able to drink the wine, oh shucks.

there were lots of moans and groans all round, along with echoes of typical, knew it was too good to be true. Until I piped up that I had a penknife with a corkscrew in it - so that would make short work of opening the bottles of wine...

Cue lots of cheers from most of the department and one very pissed off boss who had been counting on the bottles going home with her as she had deliberately not taken a bottle opener in (turns out she was known for doing this)...😂

These days I don't have a Swiss army penknife in my handbag as times have changed - but I do miss it as it was very handy for all sorts of things - but being able to open a much needed bottle of wine at will was definitely one of the things I miss the most!

And what airline was it, do you remember? (Re the useful box of drugs)

CrumbsInMyBra · Yesterday 23:40

pollyglot · Yesterday 23:14
One of my colleagues in the school staffroom choked on a watermelon seed. Despite the compulsory up-to-date First Aid certificate demanded of all teachers, everyone sat there stunned, while the poor woman choked and gagged and turned a variety of colours. I leapt up and performed the Heimlich manoeuvre, whereupon the watermelon seed made a return visit. She was very grateful. One of my many medical events in 47 years of teaching, which included several epileptic fits, a couple of severe asthmatic attacks and a major anaphylactic incident.

She was choking on a singular watermelon seed? That’s a very odd scenario and quite hard to imagine how that could even happen considering how small watermelon seeds are.

Wow. Really? You would bother to post to suggest some mendacity on my part?

I do assure you, though fail to see why I should have to justify my statement, that she was choking on a watermelon seed. Watermelon seeds in my part of the world are a very substantial size. Perfectly formed to choke a small-ish woman.

The house across the road from me burned down the day after I'd done advanced fire safety training for work.

To be fair it didn't help me (or them) an awful lot other than to emphatically stop people from trying to break in and go inside - having been in a simulated exercise the day before I knew it wasn't survivable in there.

I worked with a doctor who saved a woman’s life on a plane.

He and a colleague used a coat hanger, tubing, adhesive tape and brandy for an emergency operation on a fellow British Airways passenger at 35,000 feet during a flight from Hong Kong to London.

Paula Dixon, 39, had been in an accident on the way to the airport Saturday but boarded the overnight flight to London despite some pain in her arm, the airline said Tuesday. Some time after takeoff the pain got worse and the captain asked if any doctors were on board.

Doctors Angus Wallace and Tom Wong responded. They put a makeshift splint on Dixon's arm, but were later called back when she reported chest pains and difficulty breathing and they found she had broken ribs and a collapsed lung. Wallace, an orthopedic surgeon, told the British Broadcasting Corp. he feared Dixon's life would be in danger unless a chest drain could be inserted to relieve pressure on her working lung from air in her chest cavity. He asked for the plane's emergency medical kit. 'It's quite well equipped for having babies and for people who develop urinary blockages, but there's absolutely nothing that helps you if you have to put a chest drain in.

The doctors decided to use what they could find, and gathered together a knife, some tubing, a coat hanger, a roll of tape and a bottle of mineral water. They used brandy to sterilize the 'surgical equipment.'

My sister in law is a consultant in emergency medicine. She flies a lot and often gets the call to help on a plane.
One time there were quite a few doctors on board, as they were off to a convention! She and about 20 others stood up.

Years ago I went to a performance of singalong The Sound of Music. The host invited members of the audience down to the stage at the start so that we could admire the costumes - there were people dressed as nuns, goatherds, costumes fashioned from curtains, an mountain, (ahem) German soldiers…etc. Loads of people were standing on the cover to an orchestra pit. There was a load crack as the board they were all standing on gave way and they fell down into the pit.

A few people suffered some broken bones but fortunately nobody was seriously hurt. I’ll always remember though the host standing on the stage asking if there was a doctor in the house and a whole group of really tall guys in full nun costumes complete with habits and beards stuck their hands up. They were doctors on a night out. You just never know where help will come from.

I, sadly, have no special skills.