Heroic nurse saves woman on British Airways flight

January 21, 2019

Featured in The Sunday Mercury and Birmingham Live

A HERO nurse has told how she fought to save a fellow passenger’s life at 30,000 feet as a woman fell desperately ill on a flight to London.
Paediatric nurse Michelle Smith was flying home from a holiday in Hawaii when cabin crew appealed for help from anyone medically trained.
Michelle, who works at Sandwell Hospital, rushed to the front of the plane where she found a woman being violently sick.
The passenger had missed doses of insulin and was suffering from dangerous diabetic ketoacidosis, which can lead to brain swelling, coma and death if not urgently treated.
But Michelle and a fellow American doctor on the flight were able to save the woman’s life with just meagre medical supplies.
“It was quite the eventful flight home,” says Michelle, from Bartley Green, Birmingham. “I dread to think what would have happened if we hadn’t have been on the flight.”
Michelle was travelling back from a week’s holiday in Hawaii with 24-year-old daughter Ebony and her daughter’s boyfriend, Harvey, and had transferred at Los Angeles.
It was two hours into the British Airways flight from LA to London Heathrow that an air stewardess made an announcement that a passenger had fallen ill.
She asked anyone medically qualified to approach the front of the cabin.
Qualified nurse Michelle, who works at the paediatric assessment unit at the Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust, alerted the crew that she could help.
“My daughter turned to me and said ‘Mum, I think you’re going to have to go up’,” explains Michelle, 46.

“I waited about a minute to see if a doctor appeared, but then waved my hand at the air stewardess.
“I told her I was a paediatric trained nurse, usually working with children, but I would do what I could to help.
“I was taken to the first class section at the front of the plane, where there was a lady who was clearly very sick.
“I approached her and there was an awful smell, which is a symptom of DKA, diabetic ketoacidosis.
“She was lying down in first class, moaning and groaning and vomiting. She was obviously in pain, and was extremely poorly.”
The Swedish passenger, who was aged in her 30s, was a diabetic and told Michelle she had not taken insulin for three days after her supply was stolen.
“DKA is very dangerous and I knew that the first thing was to hydrate her and try to stop her vomiting,” says mum-of-two Michelle.
“If not, she would go into a coma, and it can be fatal.
“Ideally, you would give a patient insulin, but there wasn’t any available. The cabin crew had insulin needles, but no insulin.
“So without it, you need to try to flush out the poisons, the ketones, by drinking as much water as possible.”
Minutes later, another fellow passenger who works as an A&E doctor in the USA, joined Michelle to help give urgent treatment to the woman.
“We began working together to try to stop her vomiting and try to get her to keep some water down,” says Michelle.
“Her blood sugar level was extremely high at 22. Normally it should be between 4 and 7.
“We still had eight hours left of the flight, and there was no way that she was going to make it.
“The American doctor said she had anti-sickness medication with her, but cabin crew wouldn’t let us use it.
“We managed to cannulate her with a small fluid bag they had, but it turned out to be leaking, so we had to tape it up.
“It was just one thing after another. We managed to fix it and I stood and held the bag because there was no drip stand.
“The lady just kept saying ‘Thank you’ over and over again.”
As Michelle worked to keep the passenger stable and stop her falling unconscious, the pilot made an emergency landing in Toronto.
The patient was immediately taken off the plane by paramedics and taken to hospital for further treatment.
If not for Michelle and the doctor’s quick-thinking actions, the flight could have ended in tragedy.
“You go into auto-pilot,” explains Michelle. “You don’t think about it.
“My nephew once swallowed a whole tree of broccoli and began choking, and I did the same then.
“The lady needed the two of us, so we just did what we needed to do. It was very much a team effort.”
After less than an hour grounded in Toronto, the flight resumed its journey to Heathrow.
“As a thank you, the cabin crew moved me to first class for the rest of the flight, which was kind,” says Michelle.
“They’ve also offered me a free return flight to somewhere in Europe, so I’m hoping to go to Greece this summer.”
Read the full story here.