I Have Only Ever Used My First Aid Training Once

Picture it: a nothing special flight from Hanoi to Saigon in September 2020. This flight was during the height of COVID, but this story isn’t about that. This story isn’t about the fact that my Cathay Pacific flight out of Saigon was cancelled while I was en route to Saigon. This story isn’t even about what the Australian (Morrison) Government did to its citizens who were stuck outside the country during this time. This is a story about me on this nothing special flight to Saigon, full of Vietnamese people flying from Hanoi.

We were an hour into the two-hour(ish) flight when I noticed a ruckus: the flight attendants were running up and down the aisle like headless chickens, all in a panic. Assuming the man in the aisle seat next to me spoke English, I asked: ‘What’s going on?’. He looked up from his phone and shrugged, and said: ‘I don’t know’ and turned his attention back to his phone. Me being the curious person that I was, I stood up in my seat and saw a Vietnamese man, having a seizure on the floor. The flight attendants did not seem to know what to do, hence the running up and down the aisle.

I thought: I have to do something because the people who were supposed to be doing something weren’t. I squeezed past the phone watching man and made my way across the plane to where the man was still seizing. I calmly took charge and told the flight attendants that he needed to be in the recovery position, that is, on his side, with the upper leg bent to stop him rolling on his stomach. I told them to protect his head from banging on the feet of his seat.

‘Are you a doctor?’ one of the asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But I do have first aid training.’ I didn’t tell them that I hadn’t done a refresher for a while because they didn’t need to know that.

They did what I asked, and we rolled him into position. Five minutes later, he had stopped seizing and was trying to get back to his seat. I told the attendants to tell him to stay where he was in recovery position and that he would be tired and that was ok. He complied and stayed lying on the floor until the seatbelt sign flashed on, and we were coming in to land.

I passed the man when I disembarked, and he was still in his seat. He seemed ok, maybe a little tired.

It’s odd that in all the years I’ve taken first aid training, this was the first time I used it: on a nothing special flight from Hanoi to Saigon.

I can only hope that Vietnam Airlines  have improved their first aid training for flight attendants since then. Lord knows what they would have done in the case of a passenger having a heart attack or an anaphylactic episode! Panic is not an option.

501 words.

About the #MicroMemoir2025 Challenge

After successfully completing my #12Essays2024 Challenge — by the skin of my teeth, mind you! — I’ve set myself another writing challenge for 2025. This time, my challenge is to write 62 micro memoir pieces this year because I’ll be 62. I’ve done the maths: it’s one piece every five days or so. I got the idea from Deborah Sosin’s post on Brevity, where she wrote about the 70 x 70 word micro memoir pieces she crafted to commemorate/celebrate her 70th birthday. She ended up publishing these pieces as a book. Like Deborah, I enjoy the creative constraints of writing short pieces (and I’ve had some success writing flash fiction). I’ve done a number of Craft Talks workshops on writing micro memoir, but haven’t really written any. So, self, let’s get to it. Challenge accepted, although my word count will be a tad more lenient.

Image credit: Flight Report