Shakes on a plane

We went to the airport again and got to go on a very big shiny plane. I love it. We drive out onto the tarmac and the planes seem so much larger when you park beneath them. It’s windy, cold and very loud. The unmistakeable smell of jet fuel is carried on the wind. We head inside and up some stairs to the gate lounge. It’s so much quieter inside. A pack of us stand there silently waiting for the plane to taxi to the gate. The airport people, the airline staff, the customs people, the quarantine officers and a couple of paramedics with their bags – all with their jobs to do, all looking pale and sickly under the fluoro lights of the gangway.

The plane door eventually opens up. The well-tanned flight attendants say good evening and still manage to smile even though I know they have probably been doing it through gritted teeth since they left LA, Singapore or Dubai or wherever it is they have come from. The flight staff tell us they will wait for our all clear before moving people off. We walk on past business class, into the cabin and 200 faces look up. The quarantine people are anxiously waiting for us to tell them that we don’t think its something nasty like SARS or Bird Flu. Who knows what they’d do if we thought it was – perhaps tow us back out to the middle of the runway and leave us there to fend for ourselves…

I work my way down the rows towards row 26, bumping my bags into chairs, people and fittings. Sorry…excuse me…Row 22, 23, 24…..its going to be a window seat. It always is. People are standing in the gaps between the rows, cabin luggage in hand, anxious to get off. A young girl is curled up against the window with her knees drawn up. She peers out from under her hair and I can see she’s been crying. I ask the person holding her hand to move out and talk to my partner while I slide in to the seat next to her. At least I can say I sat on a plane even if I didn’t actually get to fly anywhere. For a brief moment I realise how much I’d like to be flying back from somewhere warm.

The girl’s English is poor and I take a second to understand her accent and sentence structure. It’s weird like that, I find you sort-of ‘tune in’ to the way people talk. I can overhear my partner talking to the crew and she’s being told; “…the girl was shaking violently during the flight…they though it was a seizure….is she going to be ok?...we gave her some oxygen”. I do a bit more of an assessment and see that the girl is still trembling. I can see she seems in no immediate danger and I give the flight attendant the go ahead to move everyone off the plane. We don’t need to get off in a hurry and in a few minutes it will be a lot calmer and quieter in the cabin. The quarantine person taps me on the shoulder anxious for my opinion. I quietly relay to him that I think it might be an anxiety issue. He seems happy with that and goes away writing something on a clipboard. The people begin to file off the plane and I notice with some amusement that the same rubbernecking behaviour we see with car crashes happens as the passengers shuffle past us down the aisles.

The girl turns out to be older than she looks and is travelling with her parents who speak no English at all – we struggle to find out much information from them. I turn back to the girl and she has begun to violently shake again. I can see why the flight attendants were a bit freaked out. She’s shaking, but it is clearly not a seizure. I hold her hand and get right in her face while we talk. She calms down a bit. The plane empties and we walk her a few steps to where my partner has a wheelchair waiting. I watch the parents as we walk out and see that they are not looking quite as concerned as I would expect – I figure they have seen this before. I give them a reassuring smile but it seems to have little effect.

We head down in the lift to ambulance and all climb in. I start my assessment again from the top. I want to be sure I haven’t missed anything. She starts breathing heavily and the shakes begin again. I catch my partner’s gaze in the rear-view mirror. She looks puzzled – so am I. It looks like an anxiety type episode, but with very little dialogue between any of us, it’s hard to tell. We follow the escort car as it leads us out to the airport gate. The driver waves us on and I hear my partner call out “thankyou” even though the escort guy can’t hear us.

Soon we are on the freeway heading for hospital, me holding the hand of a distressed girl, her mother staring at me expressionless, her dad up front sitting silently as my partner guides us towards the city. I can’t help but wonder what they are all thinking.