35 “Is Anyone Here A Doctor?” Stories That Went From Zero To Chaos Fast

Not a doctor. Just Jewish.

Services are going well Saturday morning, when one man on the bimah keels over. Rabbi leaps over to check on him, president gets up and yells "is there a doctor here? "

50 people stand up. Wealthy Jewish congregation. President throws his hands up "wait! Is there a cardiologist here? "

Now it's down to three rushing the bimah. Guy had had a pretty major heart attack but lived.

This happened to my mother:
She was on a long plane ride sitting next to an older lady when halfway through the flight the woman started to go into cardiac arrest. She freaked out and called for help, and the captain went on the loudspeaker asking if there was a doctor on the plane.

As it turned out, there WAS in fact a doctor on the plane. Several, actually. A team of cardiologists was going to a conference in the city the plane was landing in, and they had all their equipment in carry-on. They got the woman stabilized almost immediately. She was actually better of than if she had a heart attack on the street, because she didn't have to wait for an ambulance.

I am not the doctor; my wife is. We weren't married then. This was in our first few months of dating.

I work in the entertainment industry, and we were at a pre-release screening of 127 Hours aka the James-Franco-saws-off-his-own-hand movie. I wasn't super excited about seeing it, but I was hosting a q&a with the director after the film, and looked forward to impressing my date with how cool I was, getting to do this onstage interview.

So the movie, it turns out, is pretty good. And the money scene where Franco gets to hacking at himself was pretty effectively harrowing. Maybe too much so. As the scene unfolds, there are gasps around the crowd. Suddenly across the aisle from us, someone yells "we need a doctor!" A guy has pretty much collapsed in his seat, can't seem to breathe.

My gal leaps into action like a total pro (even though she'd only graduated from med school maybe 6 months before), is by the guy's side, propping him up in the aisle, checking his vitals. Meanwhile, James Franco is 70% of the way through his wrist... more gasps and screams, and the nerve-slicing soundtrack/sound design is going full blast. Suddenly, someone else comes down the aisle... could she look at *another* audience member who has collapsed on the other side of the theater? There was at least one more person who lost it, so for the final sequence of the movie, she is overseeing a one-person triage unit in the lobby of the screening room until the paramedics came. I wanted to run out and be with her and generally bask in her awesomeness, but didn't want to miss the last part of the movie in case the director started talking about it.

In the end, it was nothing serious... panic/anxiety attacks, mostly. But there is no question in my mind that there would have been enough panic to end the screening if she hadn't been there.

As it turns out, the director was 20 minutes late to the q&a, so then it was my turn to save the day by getting onstage and entertaining the crowd extemporaneously for what felt like an eternity. Honestly, I was kind of lucky that all that craziness went down since I could spend a fair amount of time getting reactions from the crowd and doing a "well, *that* was pretty crazy, right?" routine.

Plus, when the director finally did show up, I had a pretty killer opening question.

But it was an awesome night in retrospect. Me and my gal were both at our best in our completely different ways. We'll have been married four years as of tomorrow.

My flight from SeaTac to Nashville was delayed for hours, and my friend was there to see me off. We sat at the bar for hours and got completely drunk. I finally got on the plane and planned to have a drunken nap, until the whole "is there a Doctor on the plane" thing started. Now, technically I'm not a doctor, but I am a PA with 20+ years' experience. I didn't respond, until they had no volunteers after 3 announcements and said they were going to have to turn the plane around. Oh no, I thought.

So, I ring my call light and tell the flight attendant the truth- I'm a PA who is wasted. That was good enough for them. I'm whisked to the back, while others are applauding, and there is my patient- an extremely old man who appears dead. Ashen white, unresponsive. I have no medical equipment except for an AED. But wait, he had a pulse! Not dead.

When I practice medicine, I rely on my Spidey Sense. It rarely fails me. It's my party trick. So, with all my drunken might, I summon it up, and it comes to me... I ask the flight attendant for a juice box, and squirt some OJ into his mouth. Bam! His eyes pop wide open and he asks where he is. Diabetic with low blood sugar for the win! The flight continues on, and they seat me next to him. The crowd goes crazy, and I am rewarded with....drink coupons.

My wife was on a plane and they asked for a doctor, she is an eye doctor and I kept telling her to volunteer, she refused until she found out it was actually an eye injury.

Shared this one before, I think, but was on an American flight from Pittsburgh to London and we were somewhere over Greenland.

A flight attendant spoke over the PA asking if there were any doctors on board. When she asked a second time, I finally hit my call light and a passenger was having chest pains. A brief examination told me it was less likely cardiac and more likely hepatitis (obvious jaundice). I needed the person to lay down and told the flight attendant that I needed to monitor his condition for any changes, but I didn't think an emergency landing was necessary. The only seats that reclined that far was in first class, so I got my upgrade.

We landed at Heathrow without incident and had paramedics waiting at the gate. When I got home from my trip, i had a letter waiting for me from the chief medical officer at American thanking me and giving me 50,000 frequent flyer miles, which was good for a domestic flight.

I went back to work after having a dental appointment.

Ran to a Code Blue in the lobby. Patient suspected of having a stroke.

I was going through my neuro exam. The problem was I was trying to do things like see how symmetric his face was, but I was trying to say puff out your cheeks or stick out your tongue and my mouth was totally numb. I couldn't do it. It was rather embarrassing. The patient was fine by the way.

In my towns school district our superintendent of schools demands that he be addressed by doctor(then last name). He does have his PhD, but even if you mistakenly call him superintendent(then last name) he will say "Dr."..really pompous and in your face about it. In the town it is an ongoing inside joke that everyone talks about because of his insistence, well last 4th of July our towns parade was going on and it was blistering hot, while the procession is passing by a lady faints from the heat about 10 ft from him. Someone yells for a Dr. and I swear to god all the people in ear shot who were victims of his name aggression came out of the woodwork pointing at him saying" He's a Dr.....He's a Dr"...he absolutely froze with the deer in the headlights look and turn and speed walked away.....after that incident he was ok with Superintendent(then last name)...

College Halloween party and some kid passed out from what I heard was a combo of a bunch of Xanax and liquor. Everyone at the party found the guy dressed as a doctor who had a stethoscope to check if he was breathing.

Insert plane story.

Was on a plane with my aunt 20 years ago, and when the flight took off her lungs collapsed.

Of course they asked for a doctor, who using a coat hanger basically stabbed her with it put tubes in her and saved her life. The doctors made it in the papers.

Crazy stuff.

I'm a nurse, but the funniest thing I ever saw was when a dentist was the first to respond to the call for a doctor. He got there to see the patient sweating but lying very still (the man was sitting 2 seats away from me), saying there was 'pain in his stomach'. The dentist checks the pulse, looks at the pupils, pushes on the abdomen and the patient jumps a little, but goes back to staying still. Dentist's assessment: if he were seriously sick he'd be thrashing about a lot more in pain. It's safe to fly the remaining 3 hours to our destination.

Then a psychiatrist comes along (turns out he was in the bathroom when the call was made) and has a look at the man. He takes one look, prods the abdomen, and tells the attendants that the plane needs to land *immediately*. 1.5 hours later the man was in hospital with a perforated appendix.

I suppose this isn't all that surprising when you consider the number of abdomens a dentist has to assess during their training i.e. zero. The dentist sat very red and subdued after the pilot rightly asked 'which of them has the medical degree?' before deciding when to land.

Not my story, but a few days ago, a elderly woman was choking on my flight for at least 2-3 minutes. The flight attendants were completely ignoring the situation even though multiple people went up and told them. Luckily a doctor preformed the Heimlich maneuver and saved her.

"Is anyone here a marine biologist?".

At Ultra music festival one year, a girl passed out and started seizing in front of me. I wasn't in a state of mind to do much of anything, other than protect her airway and get EMS. Between overexerting herself, the heat, and likely ingestion of something laced, she just a recipe for disaster.

Prior to that, my nickname in our group was Captain America (I was one of the only native born Americans in our crew). After that, I became Dr. Captain America. In all reality though, I was pretty useless.

Student doctor story? This happened at a grocery store down the road from a large University known for its health science programs. They put a call over the PA asking for anyone with medical training to come to the desk, as someone was having a medical emergency. There was practically a stampede of people going to help - guess it was prime time for the students from the med programs to do their shopping.

I was the 'is there a doctor on the plane' twice. First time, I was flying from LAX to JFK, and it was pretty simple - a woman with a cramp in her leg worried about a blood clot in her leg, but mostly I think just anxiety. (you would be OK for a couple of hours even with a clot) The second time was a little more nerve wracking - the man passed out, was sweaty and pale. He woke up, threw up, then said he felt OK but just tied. The on-board stethoscope is a useless prop since it's a cheap one, and you can't hear over the noise anyway. He had a good radial pulse, which means his systolic pressure is at least 90, and he was breathing OK without chest pain. He didn't have any obvious cardiac risk factors. There's not really anything you can do - the only decision is 'ground the plane' or not. My instinct told me he was OK and I was 95% confident that there was nothing seriously wrong. We were about 45 minutes from our destination, and when the flight attendant asked me what to do, I asked her how fast we could get there - she said we could get there sooner. The pilot got us there in 20 minutes, and we went straight to the gate. It was pretty cool, because we had been behind, but we wound up getting in on time, even with getting him off the plane first. I stayed with him for a while, an he was OK - happily he and his wife went on to have a great vacation. It was nice that a whole planeload of people were happy with me - probably because we got there early. I've had friends who made a plane land for someone with chest pain, who turned out to have a massive MI, and wound up with an entire plane load of people pissed off at them.

Was at the movies in a almost empty theater when someone had a seizure in our row. There were only about 20 people in the theater, 5 of them happened to be nurses trying to enjoy their day off (none of them knew each other, they just all had a day off and decided to see a movie).

Until they realized something was going on and turned on the lights, I was using the flashlight in my phone (my now husband was on the line with 911 and relaying questions/answers back and forth) and even without a medical background I was able to help since it turned out the girl with the seizure was taking a medication I was also taking at the time so I was able to let them know that "that can increase chance of seizures" when they got to the "is she on medications" part.

Was at work when an elderly lady fell down the escalator. Fortunately the customer in front of her was a nurse.

OK - this happened not to me but to my boss a number of years ago when I was a post-doc. He was a prostate cancer surgeon, and a good one. We were taking a flight to a conference on prostate cancer, and someone on the plane had a heart attack. They did the whole "is there a doctor in the plane" thing, and he came forward. I saw the look on his face, because W*F are you going to do at 30,000 ft with no equipment, also you specialize in another whole part of the body? He checked the guy, confirmed the problem, had him take his heart pills, and had them land the plane. The guy survived, but really, calling for a doctor under a lot of those situations isn't much use beyond basic help and diagnosis. They don't carry stimpacks with them under normal circumstances.

Not my story, but a colleague's father is a doctor. Their whole family is pompous, especially the dad. He would ask everyone to call him "Dr. so-and-so" and would sign literally everything that you have to sign. Receipts at restaurants, delivery stuff, ect. They were flying back to Bangladesh and a man collapses mid-flight, so they are asking if there are any doctors. His father doesn't say a word the whole time just because it didn't want to actually do anything. No one else answered, so the flight attendant looked at the passenger list (not sure if that's what it was specifically, but they had a list of passengers somehow) and saw that he had sure enough put himself down as "Dr. so-and-so." They go to him directly and ask for his help, which he couldn't refuse at that point now that he had been outed. His father doesn't sign anything as "Dr." anymore now.