BRAVO: Delhi- based Doctor Couple save Woman in Respiratory Distress Mid-Air

Delhi: A mid-air miracle was recently witnessed in a routine flight after a Delhi-based doctor couple revived a woman who accidentally aspirated a gummy bear and went into respiratory distress. The incident took place this past week.

A 78-year-old woman, identified as Preetpal Kaur was on board an Air India flight from Delhi to London when a gummy bear got lodged in her windpipe. Luckily for her, a doctor couple was present in the flight that came to her rescue while she was on the verge of choking to death.

Speaking to TOI over the phone from London, Dr Anupam Goel and Dr Misha, the doctor couple who work at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital said, “We were travelling to London to attend a conference on endoscopic surgery. Midway, there was an announcement about this woman collapsing suddenly and the need for a doctor. We volunteered to help,” Goel said.

The cause of respiratory distress wasn’t clear initially, the doctors said. The woman was unconscious and frothing from the mouth and her pulse was feeble.

“Her blood pressure was also unrecordable. The patient was gasping. Her left pupil was dilated, which suggested neuro involvement. There was also wheezing, which suggested respiratory involvement. The cause of respiratory distress wasn’t clear at that time,” Dr Goel recounted.

He added that they put her on intravenous normal saline and started ventilating with AMBU bag-mask ventilation and oxygen.

It took the doctor couple around 40 minutes to revive her. “The passengers on board were curiously looking at us trying to revive the patient; some of them praying for her too. It worked. We managed to keep her from choking to death with the limited means — lack of equipment like a laryngoscope to examine the throat, enough normal saline and oxygen mask — till the time emergency landing could be made,” the doctor couple said.

 “We did our job as doctors. There’s nothing extraordinary about it,” the humble doctors added.

Meanwhile, the pilots managed to secure emergency landing in Budapest where emergency care took over the medical management.

Budapest Airport’s AMS (Airport Medical Sevice) posted on its Facebook page later that the gummy bear was removed from the patient’s airway, which helped revived breathing and circulation, reports TOI.