Turbulence

My friend recently lost a young passenger when she was working a flight. I was a flight attendant for 35 years. I was fortunate enough to never have a passenger die on my watch. We came close but we were fortunate enough to save his life. I can’t imagine how that must feel; losing someone you are fighting so hard to save. In spite of them performing CPR and using all the life saving measures that we have on board the airplane her young life was lost. There are some dark moments when you’re a flight attendant. It’s mostly fun and excitement, yes but we’re trained for the darker things that happen. That’s why we are really there.

My stepfather, whom was a minister, would equate life to an hourglass. He would say that from the day that we are born the hourglass flips. Each of us has only so many grains of sand in our glass. Each being different amounts but no more or less than our allotted number. You can’t cheat either. No matter how much we’d like to think that the extra set of pushups or the bowl of salad instead of the slice is adding some time to our existence, it probably doesn’t mean that it is. We just feel better About ourselves. Maybe look better as well. I truly dont really know. I dont have any answers. My guess is that no one does.

I have so many stories about my flying days. Some comical and silly, some hilariously funny but some sad and heartbreaking too. One of the scariest flights that I had was from Tokyo to San Francisco. A young mother of two boys became unresponsive. She was foaming at the mouth, eyes rolled back in her head when the older of the 2 boys came to fetch me. He said I can’t wake my mommy. I walked to their row of seats. A row that I had passed several times during our 12 plus hours together offering food and drinks snacks and water or just doing wellness checks on them. I remember having passed them several hours before and the mom was reading what seemed to be scriptures while the boys slept. After I couldnt get the young woman to respond we paged for a doctor. The doctor didnt have any success either. Since we were just a few minutes from landing we had the flight deck call paramedics to have them waiting for us when we landed. The EMTs carried the young woman off the plane and sent her directly to a hospital. The boys were crying and were sent with an agent to find their next of kin. Several weeks later I saw the agent that took the boys and asked what had become of the woman? What had been the matter? The agent lowered her eyes as they became glassy with tears and said oh… its so so sad. She then told me that the woman had almost died from an overdose. She was now incarcerated. In an attempt to secure a better life for her family she had swallowed several ballons filled with drugs. Her husband was being discharged from the service and she had agreed to do this one time so that they could buy a home in Houston. One of the ballons had burst. An entire family destroyed by one bad choice. The agent and I stood silently in reflection.

The man that I mentioned earlier, was traveling with his wife. She called to one of our flight attendants after we turned the lights on for breakfast that she wasn’t able to wake her husband. After several attempts to wake the gentleman, I was called to the scene. I was the purser of the flight. I too, called to the gentleman and shoke him the way that we are trained to do. He slumped forward. He was pale and ashen grey. I knew immediately that he was no longer with us. The flight attendants jumped into action. I had one of them page for a doctor while I sent another for the medical equipment in the back of the plane. The others still needed to serve breakfast. We found two doctors and a nurse. We cleared the area and moved him to the aisle floor to begin CPR. We shocked his heart with a defibrillator several times and decided to gave him an IV. All of this on the floor of an aircraft. After what seemed like hours but probably more akin to twenty minutes he took a breath on his own. The passengers that were around us heard the news and began cheering. When we landed we had paramedics meet us. They took him to the hospital. He survived.

I have evacuated an airplane after a fire. I have held a young woman on landing sitting on her legs while another flight attendant held her arms because she was going into rigor mortis, and we couldn’t get her back into her seat. She was alive when we landed in Amsterdam but I do not know her ultimate fate. I have shocked another man back to life and watched him walk off the plane on his own two feet. I have held babies for moms so they can eat or pee. I have chased a cat through the cabin that had gotten lose from its carrieR. I have handcuffed intoxicated passengers and even had some arrested. I have gathered live turtles. I was lost for 8 days in Amsterdam during 911 without a way to tell my family that I was okay for the first two of those days. And so so so much more. I suppose in 35 years that’s inevitable. Flight attendants ARE first responders and so undervalue.

Twenty years ago, when my daughter was a teenager, we would sit down to dinner and she’d say mom tell us a story about what happened on your trip this time. I always had something to tell. Always!