Wednesday, October 25, 2017 4:14 am EST – on United Flight UA252 from Honolulu Hawaii to Houston, TX
I was sitting in Business Class, a window seat, on the right hand side of the plane, maybe seat 4L, definitely 4L, I just checked my ticket. I was never supposed to be on this flight, however my flight the previous day departing Guam had been cancelled due to weather.
Intially, the seven hour flight from Guam to Honolulu, Hawaii was pretty uneventful. I sat next to this older quiet Guamidian (no idea what people from Guam refer to themselves as) gentleman. We ate breakfast, cheese omelette, fresh fruit, yogurt and two cinnamon rolls (the only free food I was expecting in the next 24 hours).
I watched three movies, Baby Driver, Fist Fight, and Going in Style. Movies are almost always treated as a pure distraction for me, so don’t judge. With about 1.5 hours remaining in the trip, as I was halfway through Going in Style, they served us a light lunch, comprised of a roast beef sandwich, small salad and a coke…bonus free food. The movie finished around the same time as my dinner. I pee and check the clock. One hour left, my next Tim Ferriss podcast is 54 minutes long (Episide 46, Hating Tech…), so I listen to it while I play a game on my phone.
36 minutes into the podcast, I notice a commotion in the isle in front of me and to my left, people scrambling, flight attendants calling for any medically trained people on the plane to please come to thw front of a cabin. I can’t really see the isle, since I am on the window. I stop the podcast and start rubbernecking, I can see a foot, it looks like a woman is lying in the isle, her shoes are off, her toes are exposed, but she has a sort of wrap on her foot. The foot is twitching. She has dark Asian skin, like a tan Japanese or Pacfic Islander. A man is standing in the seats in front of me, he looks distraught, her husband I presume. He is wearing a ballcap and has dark Asian skin too.
25 minutes to land the screen in front of me silently indicates. More medical people surge the isle, out come the medical gloves, first aid kits, and limited onboard medical equipment, the woman’s foot is still twitching. I can’t hear much in the chaos. They keep calling for a doctor. There looks to be a lot military nurses or EMTs. One lady is taking charge, she is firmly ordering people around. She knows what she is doing. She feels military.
It felt totally powerless to me, watching all of this, so I decided to pray/meditate. I kept trying to project love at her and to breathe in her suffering and pain the way my friend Victoria taught me. I can’t focus but I try to tell her soul that she will be okay and she isn’t dying today. More people are surging forward, there is a doctor, I think he is a doctor, he looks reluctant to help, he is a little on the heavy side, and has trouble moving through the center row to get to the right isle. I think to myself, Jesus dude, remember your Hippocratic Oath, first, do no harm and get in there and help. Maybe he is a dermatologist or something.
15 minutes until touchdown. The lady in-charge is firm with the guy I think is a doctor. She is calling out times and doses of medication, pulses, and descriptions and other medical readings. She is telling someone to write it all down with the exact times. Word comes that the passenger may be diabetic. An Asian passenger seems to be able to communicate with her or maybe with her husband, I can’t tell. There is no sense of panic, but no one is reassuring the patient or her husband either. I can tell that the medical people can’t quickly identify the cause of her condition but it is rapidly deteriorating, the patient is in shock, maybe a heart attack. They are going to do CPR. Someone is yelling to start an IV drip. The patient’s foot is convulsing rapidly now. I don’t need medical training to know that they are going to lose her. I retreat to prayer, pyschicly pleading with this woman’s soul to stay in her body a little longer. The foot goes limp.
People are screaming “clear!” I think they are using an electrical device to restart her heart. I can see someone desperately performing CPR. No response in her foot. Her husband looks pail. I can’t do anything, so I lift the window blind. We are very close to landing. No one working on her gets in their seat. People are calling out times to touch down, another electric attempt to start her heart. All of the people working on her were incredibly calm and business like about the situation, I somehow knew, this woman had passed, she wasn’t coming back.
The touchdown in Honolulu was absolutely perfect, no one broke stride from what they were doing. We quickly pull to a gate and there is a surge of three EMTs. The lady in-charge briefly updates them and they go to work. We are being disembarked to the rear of the aircrafr but my bag is in the overhead, right where the EMTs are working. I catch a glance of a shirtless, lifeless woman being heavily worked on by three Hawaiian EMTs. They are trying to wrap her in a blanket and bring her back to life. Her soul isn’t cooperating.
A flight attendant retrieves my bag from the overhead and I am ushered off the plane. This is my first time in Hawaii, I should be joyous, but I am overrun with emotions. I can feel tears welling in my eyes.
After clearing customs in Hawaii, I see the lady that was in-charge on our flight, she is looking for the same connection as me. I ask if she thought if the patient was going to make it and she turned to me, with a remarkable casualness and said, “no, she is dead, there was nothing more we could do”.
I can’t imagine in anxiety, panic, and sheer terror that woman’s poor husband must have been and is still going through. I am tearing up just thinking about it.
While I feel firmly grounded in my spirituality and am totally comfortable the notion that the soul continues on in an infinite life, this is easily the closest I have ever been to someone passing and all of the belief systems in Universe can’t erase that image of a cold lifeless body laying in an airplane isle.
My mind did, what I imagine most people would do…I start taking an inventory of all the important things in my life. That list only included people. No material possessions, no jobs, no experiences, just people. I am not good at showing people in my life how much I love them. I should try to see my parents much more thn I do. I need to make more of an effort with friends. Seeing my daughters in a few hours is going to be like seeing them for the first time in their lives, I can’t wait.
Tell someone that you love them today but yet, give them a hug and kiss, action mean more than words. Live in the now.
An Asymmetrical Life 