Mid-air heart attack: “Not today”, how doctor saved a passenger

Dr. TJ Trad, a US-based cardiologist, was snoozing peacefully somewhere over Africa when a teammate shook him awake with the words every doctor simultaneously dreads and lives for: “Someone needs a doctor.”

Bleary-eyed but already moving, Trad rushed down the aisle of the KLM flight from Uganda to Amsterdam. 

There, he found a man drenched in sweat, clutching his chest, and clearly in distress.

“Am I going to die?” the man asked, wide-eyed.

“Not today,” Trad, an invasive cardiologist, calmly replied.

It wasn’t just any chest pain. Trad knew the signs intimately — he’d survived a heart attack himself just a year earlier. 

And he wasn’t flying light. 

Onboard with him were medications and a full 12-lead ECG from his recent Cura for the World medical mission, plus a pocket-sized electrocardiogram (ECG) he never travels without — his trusty KardiaMobile, about the size of a credit card.

This tiny tool had become his post-heart-attack lifeline. Today, it was someone else’s.

Mile-high emergency room

Just three hours into the April 29 flight, the cabin turned into a makeshift ER. 

Dr Trad laid the man across a row of airplane seats, propped up his feet with pillows to get blood flowing, and started running through his mental checklist.

The patient rated his chest pain a “10 out of 10.” 

His wife, understandably shaken, looked at Trad and asked, “Do we land right now?”

Not yet. 

First, calm the patient. Then the wife. Then the flight crew. Then... everyone else.

“I think our training is so extensive that you almost get trained to be the captain of the ship and to calm everyone around you,” Trad told CNN.

Once everyone was breathing easier (figuratively and literally), the doctor ruled out blood sugar and clot-related issues, then hooked up the 12-lead ECG to assess the situation.

Suspected heart attack

What he saw confirmed his hunch — likely a heart attack.

So, he sprang into action: five different medications went in fast, and out came the KardiaMobile for constant arrhythmia monitoring.

Why the pocket ECG? 

“The later manifestation of a heart attack is an arrhythmia. That’s how people die,” said Trad.

The man pressed his thumbs onto the card, which transmitted live heart data via Bluetooth to the doctor’s phone. 

High-tech lifesaving, 35,000 feet above ground.

A cardiac comeback

Within 45 minutes, the man’s chest pain and heart rate began to settle. 

He wasn’t out of the woods, but the worst had passed — thanks to the quick intervention and Trad’s cardiac carry-on essentials.

Interestingly, fate had a hand in this story.

Trad was supposed to join the Cura for the World mission trip to Uganda back in February — but his own heart attack had forced him to delay. 

That twist of fate put him on this flight, at this time.

“I believe everything happens for a reason, I truly do,” said Dr Trad, who also see patients at Stillwater Medical Center Cardiology Clinic in Oklahoma, US.

“Angel in the sky”

As the pilot radioed in for advice, Tunisia was floated as an emergency landing option. 

Trad, now in full-on medical command mode, advised against it. The patient was stable, closely monitored by a nurse, and under control.

“If we would have landed in Tunisia, they wouldn’t have done anything differently other than obviously taking him to get a heart cath,” he explained.

Shaken but alive

The rest of the flight went by under careful watch. The man’s chest pain returned briefly during descent, but additional meds helped. 

By the time they landed, he was okay — shaken but alive and deeply grateful.

His wife was too. She told Dr. Trad: “You’re our angel in the sky.”

And that’s how a cardiologist, a credit-card-sized ECG, and a whole lot of calm turned a potential tragedy into a mid-air miracle.

In a previous post on Instagram, Dr Trad: "In a world full of indifference, it’s an honor to stand beside some truly special humans who believe in active giving."