“I Fainted Due to EarAche When I Flew With A Cold”
My daughter’s experience yesterday on a flight out of New Delhi
Did you know that flying with a cold or a a stuffy nose is a foolish thing to do? I didn’t, and encouraged my 21-year-old daughter to take her New Delhi-Ranchi flight yesterday.
The result: my daughter landed up with severe earache, needed to weakly motion to her fellow passenger to summon the air stewards, and experienced severe pain for around 20 hellish minutes.
The air stewards first revived her, and then helped her by giving her a cup of warm water to keep on her shoulder, so she could “steam her ears.”
After landing safely, my daughter still felt miserable due to her earache, stuffy nose and fever. She is feeling better now and is gingerly returning to normal.
I’m writing this because in my many years of traveling by air on many occasions, this is a bit of information I didn’t have:
Traveling with a stuffy nose or cold is a bad idea. Not just because it might infect your fellow passengers: but because it increases the severity of airplane-induced ear barotrauma.
I’m still shaking. My daughter fainted with pain. She said she felt she had a bubble in the middle of her brain, the pain was so bad. (She might have had some sinus barotrauma along with that of the ears.)
Most of the riskiest issues of pressure changes are for divers — they could even land up with lung issues wchich could kill then — but earache is no laughing matter, either.
So before you fly: decongest your nose!
