Illness/Medical Stories

At the age of 19, I was hit head-on after a drunk driver veered over the center line and into my lane. Fortunately, my injuries were much less severe than they could have been, but I did sustain a head injury and developed a seizure disorder as a result. After that, I avoided flying for […]

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A couple of years ago, my five-year old daughter and I were flying from Toronto to Tampa to visit my parents who were wintering in Florida. Unfortunately when we left, my daughter had a mild illness (just the kind of routine thing that kids get) and had been prescribed liquid antibiotics for it, as at […]

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Flight from Amsterdam – Seattle. Window seat middle of plane. Ninety minutes into a seemingly long and uneventful flight the lady in the row in front of me starts flopping around like a fish out of water.

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I was seven years old when I first flew. My second flight round trip was from Mazatlan to Phoenix on the now defunct America West Airlines. It was also my first plane ride from hell.

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Last February I flew to Vietnam to visit my brother who teaches English in the Mekong Delta. I wound up getting stuck over there for a few extra weeks because my passport and visa were stolen and I couldn’t leave the country until I had obtained new documents from the Vietnamese government. By the time […]

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I’d had bad trips before (no pun intended), but little did I know about this one in particular. Our stay in Varadero, Cuba, 02/2010, was good but not great. My sis and dad fell ill. When the holiday came to an end, we left at midnight to be at the airport at 3:00 a.m. All […]

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Not long after being hospitalized for a terrible kidney infection, my fiance and I decided to fly from Tokyo to the Middle East to visit my family. We flew with a large Middle Eastern airline, which is usually wonderful; I stocked up on all my medications and supplements, and we began our trip.

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My flights from Hell began with fifty other people, all of whom I knew. By the time we reached our destination together, none of them would have continued to associate themselves with me had we not needed to sing together for the next two weeks. This was the Colby Chorale; this was Spring Break; this […]

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Perfume Lady

February 12, 2012

in Illness/Medical Stories

In summer 2010, my parents and I were on a 14-hour flight from Tel Aviv to Newark, returning from our Israeli pilgrimage. In a row just in back of us, a woman kept on spraying perfume like she was trying to kill a mosquito with bug spray. She would NOT stop spraying it. 

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On Wednesday my family and I took a flight from Baltimore-Washington International (BWI) to Germany. I hate flying, and have awful anxiety about it, so I decided to take a Valium that I got from the doctor. Earlier in the week, my brother caught the flu and was sick. We were all worried we would […]

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It was the first vacation for several years and we really looked forward to it. Our holiday, such as it was, started on the 9th of September at Gatwick Airport where, on arrival, my wife was subject to a fall on the entry escalator. The escalator had a direction sign for EasyJet departures but none […]

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OK, just got back from a week away. On my final flight home (a little prop job) I encountered a family that was a bit disturbing. It started at the gate waiting for my connecting flight. A family of 7 entered the gate area (grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, 4 year old, 18 month old, infant) […]

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