A doctor saved the life of a woman who suffered a cardiac arrest during a trans-Atlantic flight on Tuesday on a flight operated by Dutch airline KLM. The plane was traveling from Amsterdam Schiphol airport in the Netherlands to Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Partway through the flight that takes more than 13 hours, a Dutch woman's heart stopped beating, Argentine news outlet 0221.com.ar reported.
Passengers nearby realized that the woman in her 40s was in trouble and alerted the crew who urgently requested the help of a doctor.
Straightaway, Jonatan Mareco—an Argentine doctor from La Plata in Buenos Aires Province—responded to the call and began to assist the patient.
Mareco, 36, who works at two hospitals in Buenos Aires, performed CPR on the woman for around an hour and a half. The pilot diverted to make an emergency landing in São Paulo, Brazil. The Brazilian city is located more than 1,000 miles northwest of the Argentine capital.
"The woman had no pulse and, with what we had on the plane, medical procedures were performed to keep the airway clear and rule out hypoglycemia," Mareco said.
Hypoglycemia is a condition characterized by a blood sugar level that is lower than the standard range.
Mareco continued to work despite the plane running into turbulence, as passengers watched on in horror. As he was assisting the woman, he received help from a medical colleague who was also onboard.
With the help of other people on the flight, Mareco was able to communicate with the woman's Dutch-speaking husband to obtain information about her medical history.
Asked about how exhausting it must have been to perform CPR for 90 minutes, the doctor said: "It was terrible because we didn't know where [the necessary medical resources were located], the language barrier, the narrow space in which to work, the turbulence and the people crowded around trying to look."
The doctor was able to keep the woman alive despite all the hindrances until the flight landed in São Paulo, where the woman was attended to by emergency doctors.
"When we landed, we helped our Brazilian colleagues to get her onto the stretcher," Mareco told Argentine news outlet Clarín.
Later, Mareco and his colleague received a round of applause for their actions, he told the news site.
The doctor said he and his colleague were almost unable to travel on the flight because it had been overbooked.
Newsweek contacted KLM for comment via email on Wednesday.
