04.09.2001
I was sitting behind her row on the cross-country flight from New York to Seattle when the woman started to wheeze. It started as a small whistle as the air entered and escaped he lungs through what sounded like a blocked passage. It didn’t bother anyone except the two people sandwiching her sizable mass in the middle of the row. At first I thought she was snoring. It was the flailing about that clued me and, well, just about everyone else into the fact that something was wrong with her.
The airplane was not a 747, evidenced by the fact that it had only one level, so I guessed that it was either a 757 or perhaps a ’37, though I was no aeronautics expert and actually didn’t really care. Whatever it was, it still a large plane and probably would have caused the Wright Brothers to have collective strokes when presented with the idea that their little contraption would lead to a multi-ton flying metal bird. The woman that flailed in the row ahead of me would have made any plane feel small.
She was the kind of person that would have said her family had “big bones” and that she couldn’t help that her Jello legs were about the same width as some redwood trees I had once seen while at summer camp. She was the kind of person that my dad would have called fat on his nice days and a “sick example of what humanity has become” on his drunk days which were just about all the others. I pictured her pushing a cart loaded with Hungry Man microwave-able dinners down a suburban supermarket while wearing a beaten and stained yellow housedress with those signature little flowers on the print. I’m not just saying this because I have a prejudice against fat people, because I do, but she looked really really bad. And not just bad because she was “large.”
When she started jumping around in her seat – rocking the whole structure back and forth tossing my reheated meal all over me and my two row-mates and scattering the Skymall catalog, nausea bag, emergency information card, and anything else stuffed into the little pocket, across the three rows behind me – all the while gripping her throat and anything else with enough flesh for a handhold with her pasty white fingers now with racing stripe blue veins providing color and contrast to the rest.
Her huge beak like lips opened and closed like a fishes mouth while a guttural sound not exactly, but close to, “gwalllll” escaped. It was almost kind of her convulsions to dispose of my meal since I probably couldn’t have eaten anymore. My napkin ended up on the other side of the plane, four rows back, so I wiped my jaw with part of my blue tie. It was stained with the United Airlines signature sweet potato anyway. As I tidied my self up as best as possible, the business man and woman – different businesses I supposed – on either side of her, having already put up with her wheezing, looked not only panicked, and bruised by a few of her flying limbs, but also as though they desperately wanted to be reseated. The man, who was lucky enough to be on the isle seat, unbuckled himself and leapt up screaming, “Is there a doctor? This woman needs help.”
There was no explaining why but I felt my body rise up and my voice answer in the affirmative to the question. Was I a doctor? No. I didn’t even watch E.R., not that that would have mattered a wit. The man looked at me quizzically as though to ask, if I was sitting behind her the whole time, why hadn’t I come forward before? “I’m a doctor,” I said. “I’m a doctor,” I told the teenager next to me who was cleaning the gravy from my processed turkey off of his earphones. He didn’t look happy and did not seem impressed in the least by the credentials I didn’t actually have. “I’m a doctor,” I told the stewardess who had rushed over to tend to one of her distressed passenger.
“Well, doctor,” she said to me. “Do something, she’s dying.”
The mind is funny sometimes. Nothing new there, but when she said that, I thought of Star Trek VI, the only Star Trek I’d bothered to see in the theater and that was only because I was dating a Trekie or Treker or whatever in college. “Let them die,” Bill Shatner had said. I felt a smile creep across my face and witnessed the stewardesses worried expression turn to fear. Was she right? Was I smiling because she had told me the woman was on her way out? Well, no, but it looked that way.
“Okay,” I said looking at the blob who by now had gone blue with an interesting tan tint. “Okay, well, we need to pull her out of there,” I pointed at her while looking at the stewardess and the man who’d called for the doctor. They just stood there. The whole plane just kind of stood there eyes shifting between me and my new “patient.” “Come on,” I said forcefully. “Lie her in the aisle!”
Her row-mate started top reach for her but the stewardess protested. “That’s a fire hazard though,” she complained. “What about an emergency?”
The businessman was already forcing her out exploded at the poor woman. “What the hell do you call this? She’s turning purple!” She continued to stand, stare, and not understand that exceptions could be made to some rules. Reluctantly I grabbed the dying passenger and lifted with all of my strength. With both hands I could move one leg. Trying to wrangle both legs and lift her out of her seat was impossible. I started to think that it didn’t really matter anyway since she had ceased moving in all ways except some minor convulsions. “Oh my god, she’s dead,” the businesswoman next to her cried.
“Does anyone have a knife,” I called out in a panic.
“What the hell are you going to do with a knife,” begged the businessman who had tried to move her into the aisle. He was sweating from the effort and his hair, which had been combed back neatly into a modern gentleman’s haircut, was loose and in his eyes. I wasn’t listening. I was scrambling around for the plastic knife that had come with my diner. “What the hell are you going to do with a knife,” he bellowed.
I stopped and looked him dead in the eye. “I’ve never lost a patient yet,” I said with an eerie calm I'd never felt before. “I’m going to perform an emergency surgery.” My hand touched something plastic. That was it. I held it up to my face and with my tie wiped away any prepackaged food products still on it. It was flimsy and I would have to saw but I figured it could break the skin with enough pressure.
“You’re going to do what,” the stewardess asked fairly certain that an in-flight surgery at 30,000 feet was against regulations. “You can’t do that,” she screamed. “You can’t cut her open.”
“Lady, do you want her to die,” I asked nearly screaming. I was passionate. I wanted to save her life. I had no idea what I was doing but I was certain that I had to open her up. “Now everyone, move out of my way! Your germs could cause an infection.”
“Oh, what’s the point,” asked the businessman. “Look at her! She’s dead.” Her legs weren’t even twitching anymore. She was probably dead, though I wasn’t a doctor so who was I to know.
“Time of death,” I pronounced as I looked the Timex Indiglo I picked up for maybe twenty dollars at a Longs Drugs. “Time of death, six twenty-two pm… uh, east coast time.” I started winding back my watch three hours for the time difference that would take effect after we landed. “Somebody want to write that down?” I saw about four people scribble it into their Palm Pilots as I slowly returned to my seat.
“What about the woman,” the stewardess wondered aloud.
“Hey, I just try to keep them alive,” I said re-buckling my seatbelt. “After that it’s a whole other field.”