Picture this, you pull an all-nighter on your last night at university, ready to catch an early morning coach to Heathrow Airport.
For some stupid reason, my immediate reaction was to think that someone was giving birth. However, I quickly realised it was something a lot more harrowing as I watched about 5-6 people, who happened to be doctors, get up to help the cabin crew. At this point we were above sea. There was nowhere we could land. The closest destination would have been Istanbul, and that too was a little way off.The doctors tried their best to do their job with whatever resources they had available onboard. But when the cabin crew started handing out pens and paper to a bunch of people surrounding the point of action, and the doctors looked at one another, it became abundantly clear what had happened.
As word got around the plane, it was revealed that the person who died was a 45 year old man, with the apparent cause of his death was pulmonary embolism — it occurs when a blood clot gets stuck in an artery in the lung, blocking blood flow to part of the lung. Blood clots most often start in the legs and travel up through the right side of the heart and into the lungs, a condition known as deep vein thrombosis.