College of Medicine doctor diverts plane in medical emergency


The American Airlines 767 en route from Paris to Miami was flying at about 35,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean, when passenger Suzanne Minor, on her way home with her husband from a European vacation, was awakened by an urgent announcement: “Does anyone have a glucometer on the plane? We’re having a medical emergency.”

Minor, did not have a glucometer, a portable device that measures glucose or sugar levels in the blood; still she offered to help. “I’m a doctor,” she told a passing flight attendant who led her to a man in obvious distress.

Dr. Suzanne Minor gets a hug from one of her GFF NeighborhoodHELP™ patients.

Minor is a board-certified family medicine physician, assistant professor and director for the family medicine clerkship at the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine. Her job entails teaching medical students and treating patients through the college’s signature Green Family Foundation NeighborhoodHELP™, which operates in underserved communities of Miami-Dade County.

The emergency turned out to be an elderly American man who was unresponsive. His head was bobbing back-and-forth on his chest. By the time Minor got to him, two other passengers, a French endocrinologist and a French nursing student were putting an oxygen mask on the man and Minor moved in to help. She quickly took his pulse, but taking his blood pressure with the manual blood pressure cuff and stethoscope in the airline kit was challenging. “I couldn’t hear anything through the stethoscope because of the noises from the plane!” she says.

“The most important thing was to get him advanced life support as soon as possible,” says Minor, but the plane was not supposed to land for another four hours. There was no land in sight.

Minor says she was thankful that a fourth passenger, a pediatric nurse, also joined the impromptu medical squad that worked as a team despite the language barriers. The nurse, in particular, she says, was a huge help in sorting the spaghetti-like tubing when the airlines’ on-the-ground, on-call physician asked Minor to start an I.V. –something she hadn’t done on an actual patient in years.

“Teaching our medical students how to do this on mannequins has definitely kept me sharp,” she says, “I was able to get the vein on the first stick.”

But there was little else Minor could do for her patient. She couldn’t order an x-ray or an EKG. Because of the plane noise, she could barely listen to his lungs, his heart or his blood pressure. All she and her “team” could do was try to keep him alive, and insist that the pilot divert the plane and land at the closest airport.

“I felt the irony of power and helplessness,” says Minor. “The power to say we have to divert this plane, and at the same time having little power to help this man.”

Eventually, two hours later, the plane landed in Bermuda where emergency crews took away the seriously ill patient. Due to privacy laws, Minor never found out what happened to him.

The flight continued on to Miami, but the unscheduled stop caused a delay that no doubt inconvenienced some passengers; probably even cost some to miss connecting flights.

“I looked around the plane and I could tell some people were upset (at the forced landing), but I would have done the same thing for any of them,” she says. “It was the right thing to do.”

Minor notes that being a doctor is not a job, it is a calling, and that means you’re always on call. This was hardly the first time she’d faced an emergency and had to jump into action during a vacation.

On an earlier leg of this same trip – on the train from Amsterdam to Paris, she and another doctor had been asked to help a Dutch traveler who’d become nauseous. Then there was the Canada vacation a couple of years ago when a motorcyclist went off a cliff and she and her husband were the first responders. And the time she was flying back to Miami on a redeye from Seattle and had to work on a young lady who was suddenly short of breath. “There’s always an emergency!” she says smiling.

Author’s note: If Dr. Minor asks you to go on vacation with her; you may want to pack a first aid kit.