So how do you meet nuts on planes? It’s actually far easier than you might imagine.

I’ll give a perfect example. I was going to meet our son in Bangkok to tool around the northern half of Thailand for a couple of weeks. So I was scheduled to fly from Raleigh to Washington, and from there to Tokyo, and then on to Bangkok.

But the first leg of that trip was cancelled, so the airline had to reroute me. So I ended up flying from Raleigh to Los Angeles, then to fly to Hong Kong.

I got to LA reasonably well, and after spending five hours at LAX, I was glad to get on the plane to Hong Kong. The flight was set to fly up the Pacific coast, fly over Alaska then down over Japan and finally into HKG.

We were about an hour or so into the twelve hour flight when an announcement came over the loudspeaker. “If there are any medical professionals on board, could you please identify yourself?”

(Full disclosure: I’m a Registered Nurse. I think I should respond to these. I wasn’t the only one who came forward. It was me and a midwife).

And the reason they were calling was, fortunately, a minor one. A little boy had coughed up a little blood. I won’t go into the gory details, but the two of us determined that it was nothing serious. We reassured the parents, went back to our seats, and given that our flight took off at 1:30 a.m. I fell off to sleep.

And an hour later, a flight attendant woke me up. Shaking my shoulder, she frantically said, “Mr Huffman, there’s a woman with chest pain!”

(Here’s where the nut magnet part comes in).

So I jumped up, expecting to see an elderly heart attack victim and ready to do CPR. But who do I see?

Our victim is maybe 25. Rather than flailing around or gasping for breath or acting the part of someone who’s in cardiac arrest, she’s pretty calm. And in a calm voice, she informs me, “I’m having chest pain.” And she’s – also calmly – demanding that the plane land immediately. We were over Alaska by now.

So I do the usual drill. Check her heart rate, blood pressure, listen to her heart, and count her respirations. And everything is normal. Or so it seems.

And so I take the flight attendant aside, and explain what I’ve seen. And how she’s had a bad cold for a while and she’s been coughing a lot and how that coughing had probably made her sore and that’s what she was calling chest pain. And that while I wasn’t telling her what the pilot should do, I didn’t think she was having any cardiac issues. And thati didn’t think the pilot should land in Anchorage. Or anywhere else until we got to Hong Kong.

And I thought I was done. But I wasn’t. Because the flight crew had the bright idea that our young chest pain victim should sit with me. For the rest of the flight. So they helpfully moved the woman sitting next to me to another seat and I was – figuratively speaking – handcuffed to get for the next eight hours or so.

And our victim had one last demand. Maybe an hour or so before we landed, she told the flight attendant that she wanted an ambulance at the gate. The FA then informed her that she’d have to pay HK$1,500 . When our patient asked, “How much is that in US dollars?” I figured she wasn’t too bad. When she found out the amount, she told me that she was flying on to Manila and that her sister-in-law was a doctor and she’d take care of her.