An ear-nose-throat doctor successfully delivered a baby during the middle of a flight after a woman went into labour on a passenger plane.
The Ukrainian ear-nose-throat (ENT) doctor Alena Fedchenko, was flying from Doha to Bangkok, heading to Vietnam for a holiday, when the flight staff made an announcement at around 3 am asking if there was a doctor on board.
Alena, who has 27 years of experience, was the only doctor on the flight and she sprung into action – not realising just how urgent the matter would turn out to be.
‘I thought that someone got high blood pressure,’ she explains. ‘They asked me if I had a medical license. Unfortunately, I didn’t remember mine by heart.’
But staff were desperate as the pregnant woman had now gone into labour, so Alena was given the go-ahead to call her son in Kiev, Ukraine, who provided the details from the requested documents.
Alena had not delivered a single baby in her life before, but thankfully she managed to remember everything that she studied at university. It all came flooding back to her in seconds, and she got to work.
‘I simply started doing my job,’ she says. ‘I put on the gloves and prepared the woman in labour. The baby was about to be born.’
Alena says that luckily the entire process was quick and there weren’t any complications.
‘The woman wasn’t at all screaming,’ she added. ‘I repeated over and over again that everything would be fine, that I am a doctor and she is in good hands. The boy was born in 15-20 minutes.’
She added that although she was worried that things might get complicated, she didn’t share her concerns with the pregnant woman because she didn’t want to panic her.
She said that the flight team did a great job assisting her, and they followed all of her instructions to the letter.
‘I think passengers around had no idea what was going on,’ she explains. ‘My husband and friends had no idea what I was up to.’
The passengers only found out what had happened when the captain made an announcement that a boy had been born during the flight – and the entire plane burst into applause.
The pilot performed an emergency landing in Calcutta, India, and the new mother and her son were taken to a hospital.
Alena had to change into a Qatar Airways uniform as her clothes were covered in blood from the birth, and she was invited to sit in business class.
‘I did everything that I had to,’ she says. ‘I felt as if I was at work. But then the baby was born, I started feeling euphoria and nearly started crying. It was such a cute baby boy.’
The doctor said that she would love to find out what happened to the woman, but she has not received her contact information.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/07/ear-nose-throat-doctor-delivers-baby-mid-flight-woman-gives-birth-plane-12199765/
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