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FEATURE
SEE SOMETHING
SAY SOMETHING
A True Tale of Travel
By Fred H. Olin, M.D.
Not long ago (and two days before I’m writing this) my wife and proceeded to board and get seated, and as we settled in we saw the
I were flying home after about a week away. It wasn’t a pleasure trip, young man pass us toward the rear.
and we were pretty tired, both physically and emotionally. We were
sitting in the gate area awaiting the call for our departing flight to Shortly thereafter, he accompanied a flight attendant to the front,
San Antonio. We had our backs to the windows and thus were facing and was removed from the plane with no furor. After he passed us
the rows of seats lined up on our side of the concourse. the young man announced rather loudly, “I’m just a musician taking
a vacation.”
Sitting directly in front of us at the end of one of the rows
was a young man, probably in his twenties. He was Anglo, had The flight to SAT was (thank goodness) uneventful. We came in
very long shaggy, uncombed hair, no facial hair, wore a black t- at Terminal A, but because of the airline we were on had to walk to
shirt with the word “Hate” on it, black jeans and running shoes. Terminal B for our luggage. As we proceeded, a First Officer (copi-
He had a well-worn, very stuffed backpack at his feet. He was lot) came up along side of us and said that he had been “deadhead-
talking loudly, seemingly mostly nonsense, rambling, singing, ges- ing” and sitting in the seat in front of us. He had stopped to talk
ticulating, waving his hands about and making miscellaneous with his colleagues in the cockpit who had told him what had hap-
other sounds. Periodically he would pull a small brown teddy bear pened and pointed us out. He thanked us rather profusely, saying
out of the top of the pack, hug it, kiss it, talk to it as if it were a that without someone saying or doing something the crew would
person, and then stuff it back in the pack. The bear had a band- never know if there was a potential problem. He told us that the
age wrapped around its left elbow. As the pre-flight announce- young man would be evaluated somehow, and decisions made as to
ments began, he suddenly said this, somewhat paraphrased: “I’ve his fitness to fly on a later flight.
got my passport, my drivers license, my birth certificate and I’m
ready to fly and die.” This concerned us. Soooo….that little four-word phrase I used for the title of this
story should remain in your psyche: perhaps the young man was
After a moment of reflection and talking with my wife, I rose harmless, perhaps he was
and went to the side of the gate-agents’ desk and got one of them high on something, or, per-
to come over and talk with me. I told him what we had observed haps, as one of the flight
and heard. He thanked us and moved toward the jet bridge while I attendants suggested, he
returned and sat down again. Finally, our seating group was called. suffers from some gener-
Just after our boarding passes were scanned, there stood the captain ally benign psychiatric ill-
of our plane with the gate agent nearby. He stopped us and asked ness such as ADD, but my
us if we were the ones who had reported what we had heard, and wife and I didn’t want to
we admitted that we were. He quizzed us just a little bit, then said find out the hard way that
“He’s not flying on this plane. I’m the captain and it’s my call.” We we should have done
something and didn’t.
34 San Antonio Medicine • November 2017
