Wednesday, December 26, 2007

"Is there a Dr. on the plane?!"

Yep, they really do say that when something crazy happens. I went home for Christmas, and since I use the word home to mean different places (ND, MN, WI) I'll be specific and say I went to my parents house in MN. The plane ride out to MN was pretty boring but I sat next to crying kids and a fidgeter with an overactive bladder. I can't wait to fly first class someday. Someday being the operative word because it means never in this case.

The ride back on the other hand had good seat mates but some serious excitement for once. Based on the time in the air we had to be somewhere over Montana when a guy 4 rows behind me had a pretty serious seizure. Someone repeatedly hit the call button to alert the attendants all the way in the front of the plane (I was in row 41 of the cattle car) that something was up and then a different attendant announced "Is there a DR. on the plane?!" As it turns out the guy ahead of me was a firefighter or EMT and a surgeon or surgical nurse showed from somewhere and worked through the seizure. I was sitting 1 row back from one of the intercom phones and they were discussing an emergency landing somewhere in MT for a while. The guy came out of it and medics met him at the gate so everything turned out OK or now. It was pretty wild but it makes me wonder how often something like that happens because lots of people fly so it can't be that rare. Just new to me I guess.

Totally unrelated to flying excitement is the homemade wine experiment. I would call the results mixed to positive. My buddy in ND made two kinds of wine, one was pretty traditional using Welch's frozen grape juice, the other used a variety frozen juices (Apple, Cranberry, etc). In Fargo the results of the grape based wine came out a little tart but very drinkable. The mixed fruit varietal was not so good and I cannot recommend this option without serious reservations about how it will taste and smell. The batch of Welch's based wine I made at my parents house turned out a little less tart and tasted good enough for my mother to say "I've had much worse" at some wine tasting club she belongs too. Success!! We are now in the process of doing a postmortem to figure out why we had such variety in the taste of the grape juice based wines. For $7 we ended up with some pretty good wine.

Pictures will be forthcoming.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey, First class isn't always lollypop rainbows and sunshine kisses either. Remember the British Air flight where a passenger from coach died over the Atlantic and they just threw his corpse in first class for the remainder of the flight? How would you like to pay a couple thousand bucks for a trans-atlantic flight and wind up sitting next to some stiff?

-Drew