When the flight attendant asks the passengers, "Is there a doctor on board?" you may be in for an adventure. Do you respond if you're a veterinarian or a psychiatrist? It might depend on the emergency. For a 1995 case, two doctors, Angus Wallace and Tom Wong, were flying British Airways from Hong Kong to London and realized that a woman who had fallen before takeoff was in worse shape than they initially knew. A fractured rib had punctured her lung, causing a pneumothorax. The air leaking into her chest cavity could kill her during descent, so an emergency landing was not an option. An account of the in-flight surgery is at Dr. Wallace's Wikipedia page.
With the limited medical equipment on board, Wallace and Wong had to improvise heavily. The medical kit had lidocaine – a local anaesthetic – but the catheter in the kit was designed only for urinary catheterisation and was too soft for use as a chest tube. The doctors fashioned a trocar from a metal clothes hanger to stiffen the catheter, and a check valve from a bottle of water with holes poked in the cap.[9] They sterilised their equipment in Courvoisier cognac, and began surgery by making an incision in the patient's chest, but with no surgical clamps available, Wong had to hold the incision open with a knife and fork while Wallace inserted the catheter.[7] The whole surgery lasted about ten minutes; the doctors successfully released the trapped air from the patient's chest, and she spent the rest of the flight uneventfully eating and watching in-flight movies.[9]
Wallace's more detailed account of the emergency was published in the British Medical Journal. Since the incident, medical kits in both British and US commercial planes have been expanded to include more equipment and medicine. -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: Alan Wilson)
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