Incredible photos show a doctor sucking urine from an elderly man’s blocked bladder after he was unable to pee during a flight from China to New York.
The 70-year-old passenger was on a China Southern Airlines plane on November 19 when he asked for immediate assistance and told cabin crew he was unable to urinate.
Flight attendants asked if there were any doctors on board. Luckily two vascular surgeons, Dr Zhang Hong and Dr Xiao Zhangxiang, were.
A makeshift catheter to extract the urine didn’t work and the doctors determined the man’s bladder was close to rupturing.
So Dr Zhang used a plastic tube and spent nearly 40 minutes sucking almost a liter of liquid waste from the man’s bladder with his mouth.
‘Saving people is the fundamental duty of a doctor,’ he said after the incident.
Incredible photos show Dr Zhang Hong, 55, using a plastic tube to suck urine from an elderly man’s blocked bladder (pictured)
The passenger, 70, called for medical assistance because he couldn’t urinate on a flight from China to New York. Pictured: Cabin crew gathered around as Dr Zhang (pictured) sucks urine from the man’s bladder
About six hours away from New York, the man’s wife summoned the cabin crew and reported that her husband was having trouble urinating.
When flight attendants rushed to the seat, they found the man ‘was emotionally unstable and sweating,’ according to an article on the social media platform WeChat.
The cabin crew then made an emergency announcement asking if there were any doctors on board.
Dr Hong, head of vascular surgery at the First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University, and Dr Xiao, a vascular surgeon at Hainan People’s Hospital, went to check on the passenger.
Cabin crew made an emergency announcement asking for any doctors on board. Dr Zhang and Dr Xiao Zhangxiang tried to build a makeshift catheter but it didn’t work due to the lack of air pressure and space. Pictured: Dr Zhang sucks urine from a man’s bladder, left, and in his official portrait from First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University
When the catheter didn’t work, Dr Zhang used a plastic tube (pictured, in plastic bag) to suck out 800 milliliters of urine (in the bottle) with his mouth waste
‘The pensioner’s abdomen was bloated, he could not sit still and was sweating a lot,’ Dr Zhang according to Chain News.
‘He was going into shock and may have suffered a risk to his life if we didn’t tend to him urgently.
‘His family said he had a history of prostate enlargement, so we suspected this was causing urinary retention.’
The doctors said the man’s bladder could rupture and they needed to get extract the urine right away.
They first attempted to build a makeshift catheter using plastic tube from an oxygen mask, a needle from a first-aid kit, plastic straws and tape.
However, the method failed due to lack of air pressure and space.
Seeing this, Dr Zhang immediately asked one flight attendant to give him a cup before putting a plastic tube into his mouth to suck the waste liquid.
Footage released by the airline company shows the surgeon repeatedly sucking the urine through the tube and then spitting the water into a bottle.
After 37 minutes, the man felt relieved and laid down in the last row for the remainder of the flight. He was examined by a doctor at New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport. Pictured: Dr Zhang sucks urine from the man’s bladder, left, and then spits it out into a bottle
”Saving people is the fundamental duty of a doctor,’ Dr Zhang said after the incident. Pictured: Dr Zhang Hong (in white T-shirt) and Dr Xiao (right, in blue) speak with cabin crew
At the same time, Dr Xiao adjusted the position of a needle inserted into the man’s bladder to ensure a smooth flow of the urine.
After 37 minutes, during which Dr Zhang sucked out almost a liter of urine, the patient’s condition improved and he laid down on the last row of the cabin for the remaining five hours of the flight.
He was examined by a doctor when he landed at New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport.
Dr Zhang remained modest when he was asked about his heroic act.
‘We really did not have any other solutions at the time, [and I] did not think that much. [I] just wanted to help him release the urine stuck in his bladder,’ he said, according to the WeChat article.