Doctoronhaul New book tells the adventures of a Heathrow medic
NIGEL THOMPSON MARJORIE YUE
All human life is at a major international airport. And death. For more than 10 years Stephanie Green was a 24-hour on-call doctor at Heathrow and encountered the deeply tragic, the utterly bizarre and the profoundly macabre.
Now Dr Green, who lives in Monmouthshire, has recorded her experiences in a fascinating book, Flight Risk. In it she tells how she was woken up by a phone call telling her two stowaways had been found on a flight from Ghana.
Sadly, the boys – barely in their teens – had sneaked into a wheel bay and died en route from a combination of extreme cold and lack of oxygen. She arrived to find a hand dangling from the undercarriage.
‘’My sole part in this was to confirm the two Ghanaians had died,’’ she says. ”It was such a waste.’’ She also recounts the strange case of Mrs Lin, who was deemed to require psychiatric evaluation on arrival.
She had arrived from America saying she had sweets to present as a gift at a meeting she had arranged with Prince Charles.
Diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia, she was repatriated for treatment and presumably HRH did not get his goodies.
Happier times at Heathrow Health Control Unit saw Dr Green checking a gorgeous adopted baby brought back from China by a British couple.
Unforgettable for her too was the time a drug mule arrived from Jamaica with a belly full of cocainefilled condoms. Another awful story is when she was called to a baggage carousel where blood was leaking out of a suitcase. It turned out to be a chopped-up monkey being smuggled in as illegal bush meat. ■■Flight Risk by Dr Stephanie Green is out now. Headline, RRP £18.99. titantravel.co.uk wightlink.co.uk/iowf19.
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