TwitterA quick thinking doctor is being hailed as a hero after he built a makeshift breathing apparatus for a toddler who was suffering an asthma attack during a long flight.
Dr Khurshid Guru, director of robotic surgery at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in New York, didn’t panic when faced with the emergency, but instead channelled the spirit of resourceful 90s TV character MacGyver.
Armed with only a plastic water bottle, a cup, some tape and an oxygen tank, Guru got creative when he was told that a child was in medical distress on the Air Canada flight from Spain to the U.S.
Flying back from ERUS15 had to design a nebuliser for a 2 yr old asthmatic over the atlantic. Thank God kid did well! pic.twitter.com/fQOJ2Ac0EA
— Khurshid A. Guru (@KhurshidGuru) September 18, 2015
The parents of the 2-year-old boy told Dr Guru they had accidentally packed their son’s asthma medication in their luggage. The boy was crying and finding it very difficult to breathe, with more than three hours left before the plane would land.
So, the badass Dr Guru jumped into action and cobbled together a makeshift nebulizer.
The plane only came equipped with an adult inhaler which requires the patient to breathe in the asthma medicine so, knowing the youngster needed both the medication and oxygen, he hooked up the inhaler to a hole in a plastic bottle and fed oxygen through another opening he created so the boy could inhale both simultaneously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKS2vsqUc64
Dr Guru shared the story on Twitter to raise awareness and to remind parents of children suffering from asthma the importance of keeping their medication at hand at all times.
Speaking to WGRZ, he said:
It’s a personal wake up call for families to make sure you carry these small things.
Thank goodness someone as smart and resourceful as Dr Guru was on board!
