A heroic dad with little medical experience rushed to help a stranger on a British Airways flight after a gruesome injury saw her foot left "hanging on by her skin".
Hemal Patel and two other passengers sprang into action mid-air after the woman, believed to be a mum in her 50s, sustained a severe fracture above her left ankle. It is unclear how she suffered the wound but it left her "a bone sticking out of a leg" and her ankle twisted at "a peculiar angle".
Cabin crew asked any passengers with medical training to come forward and, though he never served in any conflict, Hemal, 41, believed his combat training from his time at The Corps of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) 20 years ago would help.
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He assisted as a dermatologist and a retired professor, who used to do serious infectious infectious diseases, also travelling to the UK led a precise procedure to stabilise the woman's leg. They had to "reset" the foot as the plane made its way across Atlantic Ocean from Tampa, Florida to London Gatwick.
Hemal, who was travelling with his wife and nine-year-old son, told Mirror: "Her foot was pretty much hanging on by the skin and tendons only. It required myself and a dermatologist to take control, reset her foot and splint it.
"We reset that leg with minimal pain relief and the kind of the noises that she was making were ghastly but we managed to reset it. I splinted it and we stayed with her for for the duration of the flight couple of hours.
"We practiced on a cabin crew member for about 10 to 15 minutes, of me doing the pulling bit, and her (the dermatologist) doing the twisting bit, until she until we figured out how hard we were going to need to do this. We then told the poor lady that this is kind of what's going to happen and I gave her a leather belt to bite down on so she didn't break her teeth. The crew were fantastic too."
The software engineer was guided through the painful process by medics via a satellite link to doctors in the US, established by quick-thinking crew and pilots on the BA flight. The dad, who recently qualified as a pilot and can fly small aircraft, staunched the woman's bleeding and elevated the leg before the medics via satellite link explained how to "reset" the limb. They also gave permission for morphine to be given to the woman, which is believed to be protocol.
Hemal, from Reading, Berkshire, added: "She doesn't really know how it happened. She wasn't drunk. She said she tripped and stumbled, but then what we think's happened is she's got herself a fracture by tripping, and then she's continued to walk on it to the toilet. A bone has just split, split through the skin. She's probably walked on it even more. She went to the toilet, and then she started feeling the pain and kind of fell out of the toilet.
"The message came requesting anyone with medical training. I just wanted to help in any way I could, but I told the flight attendant I have combat medical training, and they said 'that's actually perfect'. I went over and I was pretty horrified. What was in front of me, was just like just a bone sticking out of a leg at a very peculiar angle. So it was a very serious fracture."
The software engineer understands the woman, who was travelling with her husband, was taken to hospital after her arrival back in the UK and has since undergone surgery to have plates and pins inserted into her leg.
A British Airways spokesperson said: "Our crews are trained to deal with these situations and we thank the medical professionals who assisted our teams on board."
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