- A 63-year-old man died on a Lufthansa flight on Thursday, according to Swiss-German outlet Blick.
- Witnesses told the outlet the man had blood gushing from his nose and mouth.
- The witnesses said passengers were screaming at the sight.
Any idea what kind of health complication causes blood to gush from your nose and mouth? Sounds insane to watch especially when you can’t leave the immediate area…
Critical care nurse here. The answer is esophageal varices.
It’s the same physiological anomaly as hemorrhoids, except in your esophagus. Swollen, fragile veins caused by increased internal pressure. In the case of hemorrhoids, that pressure inside the veins is caused by straining too much when trying to poo. In esophageal varices, the increased pressure inside the esophageal veins comes from blood backing up from a swollen, scarred, and damaged liver. So we often see esophageal varices in end stage alcohol use disorder.
Horror stories abound in emergency departments and ICUs of having to do CPR on a patient massively hemorrhaging out of their mouth from esophageal varices. As soon as nurses I know saw this report, our immediate thought was, “Yep, varices.”
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/15429-esophageal-varices
I’ll take “Reasons to never drink again for $200, Alex.”
There are a few things I wish we could really show the public. The first is how brutally savage and undignified CPR really is. And the second is what alcohol abuse really does to a person.
Chronic malnutrition, brain damage, hallucinations, anxiety, internal bleeding, fluid swelling your abdomen like a water balloon, literal ammonia building up in your blood that we treat by deliberately inducing massive diarrhea. That’s not even mentioning esophageal varices and the increased cancer risk.
Alcohol is a horrifying drug.
I scream, “break the ribs!” every time I see movie CPR haha
And then the movie patient pops up and smiles and everything is perfectly restored back to normal instead of, “Oh, we convinced your heart to start beating again, but you’re still unconscious probably because you have brain damage, your kidneys are dying, your blood is acidic, and now we’re gonna put you on a breathing machine. Best wishes!”
And yet everyone looks at me funny when I see the same and yell “sweep the leg!”
My wife’s aunt died from Cirrhosis of the liver and “so much blood” is exactly what my wife said she saw.
Well that is pretty horrific
Is it possibly related to the cabin pressure?
I forgot the medical term but when you have a REALLY bad liver the blood starts to take other ways to the heart to circumvent it (kollateral paths).
One path is going through your oesophagus so your venes widen very much. With the widening the risk of a rupture starts to increase very much and as soon as it does, there is nothing much that can save you.
I am not saying he got that but the description fits very much on point.
Obviously I doubt this but it’s a final phase of ebola.
Nah ebola is more of a oozing bloody mass. Gushing isn’t possible because low blood pressure is another complication. Also, late stage ebola this man wouldn’t be walking anywhere. Let alone well enough to be allowed on a airplane.
Disseminated intravascular coagulation, it’s when you get a bunch of clots, that uses up all your platelets, and you bleed out because you can no longer clot.
This wouldn’t explain what caused the bleed in the first place, nor how rapidly and profusely they were bleeding. Esophageal varices is a better explanation
Yeah, your explanation is probably a better one.
For real, I need a plausible explanation
Check the comments again, seems like we got it 🙂
Blood thinners possibly
Ebola virus?
Zingaya
I want to know too
T -virus
Probably scared him too
I’ve seen this movie. It did not end well.
I have read horror stories that started like this. I am not sure I want to know what happened.
If I was in the plane, I would be like “yep, it’s a coin toss between zombies or the strain.”
Jesus, the beginning of the Fringe series came to my mind!
That’s the show, thank you! I was thinking X-Files but I just knew it was wrong.
I ate a hot dog at the airport in San Juan once. The result is I lost 1/3 of my body weight, but it wasn’t blood.
You are shitting me.
Close.
I’d rather wait for some more reliable sources than Business Insider quoting from Blick. But yeah, scary.
Time to book an AirBnb in the far away country for 29 days
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A 63-year-old man died during a Lufthansa flight this week after losing "liters of blood’ in a scene that terrified passengers.
The unidentified man boarded a Lufthansa flight from Bangkok to Munich with his wife on Thursday, according to Swiss-German outlet Blick.
Witnesses Martin and Karin Missfelder told Blick that they sat in the row diagonally behind the male passenger and his wife.
“He then called for a doctor over the loudspeaker and a young, around 30-year-old man from Poland with poor English looked at the German,” Karin Missfelder said.
Data from flightradar24, an online air traffic tracker, showed that the flight departed from the Bangkok International Airport at 12:07 a.m. before diverting back amid the chaos.
Last year, Lufthansa made headlines after a flight from Texas to Germany experienced severe turbulence that sent people and food flying into the air.
The original article contains 457 words, the summary contains 138 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Seems like over the last couple of days this news is posted everywhere. I’m sure this kind of stuff happens every now and again, so why is it being pushed now? What is the purpose? What are we getting distracted from that needs our attention?
Touch grass dude
Oh great. China to Europe route.
What’s the worst that can happen?
I’m not entirely sure what’s you’re trying to imply. But Bangkok is a city in Thailand.
Lol what? Dude died from complications with alcoholism. Very common way to go once the liver stops working and your esophagus is fried from years of pouring booze down it.
