Flying Can Feel Like NFL Linebacker Pancake

Letter to Ephesians: First, the airlines took away our crappy chicken tv dinners; then, they took away our el cheapo breakfast Stroopwaffels; now they’re feeding us “toxic fumes,” too? Doctors are apparently comparing the brain effect to “concussions of NFL players.”

The WSJ must be talking about the concussed “Da [Chicago] Bears.” We’re told in an investigative piece that the above “problem is getting worse & not much is being done about it.” A Florence Chesson, e.g., was recently asked by a “fellow JetBlue attendant as they prepared for landing in Puerto Rico.” She, as trained, “inhaled a lungful of air through her nostrils in a single deep breath. ‘It smells like dirty feet,’ she told her colleague.’ Instantly, she started to feel like she had been drugged. Yet, an hour later the same plane had landed, loaded with a fresh group of passengers & was back in the sky returning to Boston.” Never mind that when the flight landed “safely” at home, two cabin crew were taken to a hospital in an ambulance, “one on a stretcher.” As for Chesson, she was to be diagnosed with “traumatic brain injury and permanent damage to her peripheral nervous system.”

This, the WSJ says, was hardly a one-off. A neurologist & consultant to the Pittsburgh Steelers, says he’s treated a dozen pilots & over 100 flight attendants for similar brain injuries after exposure to fumes on aircraft over the last 20 years. Opined the doc, the effects on Chesson’s brain were akin to a chemical concussion & “extraordinarily similar” to those of an NFL linebacker after a brutal hit.” Next time you board that “friendly skies” tomb with the shrinking seat sizes but without the crappy Dutch treat, you might want to bring along one of those Covid pandemic face masks. I know. It stinks.

Davd Soul