phobia

Last week on the Phoenix->Detroit redeye, returning from Thanksgiving weekend, flight attendants informed those of us sitting in the first few rows of coach that a woman in the back of the plane had become ill. Minutes from landing, the crew decided to bring the sick passenger to the front of the plane so that paramedics could reach her as soon as we were on the ground. We readied an empty seat, stuffing magazines into the seat pocket and, in a few moments, one of the flight attendants led a trembling middle-aged woman to us. She had clearly wet herself and she clutched in her shaking hands a plastic grocery sack into which she had thrown up. Puffy eyes suggested she had been sobbing, but now she looked resigned, as if waiting for an inevitable crash.

The woman in the seat next to her asked her why she was going to Detroit. Awkward conversation made all the more awkward by the smells of terror and sickness. Through shaky lips the sick woman said she was on her way to Washington but that if we were to make it to Detroit, she'd never set foot on a plane again. End of awkward conversation. Through landing, that calmly-waiting-for-death look on her face didn't change and, once the first-classers had left us behind, paramedics did indeed rush onto the plane accompanied by armed guards (standard procedure, I suppose, for any type of flight disturbance).

The paramedics emphasized how safe we now were, held her hand, and explained that they were going to wheel the woman into Detroit Metro airport. Her face remained stoic. But then when the lead paramedic asked her what was wrong, she said something barely coherent--I think I heard the word "bronchitis"--and began sobbing. And when the paramedic had her in a wheelchair en route to the terminal, she began to vomit again. We followed her into the airport. The paramedic and sick woman turned one way and, following signs to baggage claim, we turned the other.