Passenger on Brink of Death Mid-Flight, Off-Duty Nurses Work 3 Hours to Save Life
There isn’t any environment quite like that of a plane. A pressurized tube soaring thousands of feet above the ground at incredible speeds provides an entirely unique sort of isolation.
For Morgan Anderson, a nurse from Asheville, North Carolina, being cut off from the world in a plane had always been a source of fear.
But on Dec. 13, 2017, she’d faced it so that she could fly to Salt Lake City with her mother, Rose, to see a Lady Gaga concert.
She’d even managed to fall asleep in her seat before an announcement rang out over the PA system: The flight attendant wanted to know if there were any nurses on board — now.
“I was like, ‘Gosh, what’s wrong?’” Morgan told WLOS. “So we pushed our bell.”
She and Rose (who was also a nurse) went toward the front of the plane. There they found a daunting situation.
A passenger in his 60s sat unmoving in his seat. His head had tipped forward, and he was completely unresponsive.
“”I see him, and he’s got vomit all over his shirt,” Morgan recounted. “And I looked at my mom and was like, ‘Oh no, we’ve got to help this guy!’”
Help him they did. The mother/daughter team sprung into action and quickly discovered that his blood pressure was an astonishingly low 56/30, far below the normal threshold of 120/80.
“His blood pressure was too low,” Rose explained to the Asheville Citizen-Times.
“If somebody hadn’t done something to correct that, he probably would’ve gone into cardiac arrest and died.”
As it was, the nurses had their work cut out for them, but by making the most of their limited supplies and running IV fluids into the man, he soon regained consciousness and was able to drink water unassisted and respond to questions. He was in stable condition when the plane landed.
“I didn’t think I’d ever get to work with my mom because she’s approaching retirement,” Morgan said.
“As down on his luck as that guy was, he actually gave me a neat experience with my mom.”
More than that, Morgan and Rose’s competency provided that individual with an even greater gift: He received another lease on life.
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