When our daughter flew back from Guadeloupe during her residency, a few weeks ago, she heard midway (i.e. in the middle of the Atlantic) the dreaded (?) call from AF flight attendants for doctors in the plane to contact them. She did and, since she was both the most senior intern and with specialty the most suited to handle emergency cases, she ended up caring for a passenger suffering from respiratory issues. Fortunately, the flight was carrying medical oxygen tanks that proved enough to support said passenger all the way to a Paris airport. Once landed, an emergency team evacuated the (mostly recovered) patient in priority (but not Doctor Robert!). Amusingly, since she had purposely (!) left her doctor card in her blouse at the Basse-Terre hospital, she first needed to have a colleague on duty there to send a picture for the flight attendants to let her handle the patient!
Archive for Orly
is there a doctor on board?!
Posted in Kids, pictures, Travel with tags Air France, Basse-Terre, doctor on board, Doctors without Borders, Guadeloupe, internship, medical doctor, Orly, oxygen, playmobil, residency on November 9, 2025 by xi'anRome’ing around (& around &…)
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel with tags 10k, 4th Italian Meeting on Probability and Mathematical Statistics, cannoli, Cavour, De Gaulle airport, European Athletics Championships, fantasy, Fiumicino airport, flight mode, Instituto Nazionale di Statistica, Italy, Noctureine, Orly, road race, Roma2024, Rome, Seattle, Transavia, vasovagal syncope, YA novel on May 5, 2024 by xi'an
My trip back to Paris from the 4th Italian Meeting in Probability and Mathematical Statistics was somewhat horrendous, with a much delayed Transavia flight, due to technical issues in Orly that set us back more than two hours. That I could have spent at the conference or strolling through Rome…
Instead, I waited at Fiumicino, indulging into a cannolo (dinner) that was reasonable for airport standards. Then, as the repaired Boeing plane had just left the gate in Fiumicino, the staff informed us a passenger has had a vasovagal syncope and needed be evacuated, which proved relatively efficient, but nonetheless setting us back another two hours and cheery on the cake!, forcing the plane into rerouting to De Gaulle airport as Orly airport closes earlier at night for being in a denser urban area (and much closer to home as well).
When we arrived after midnight, there was of course no train home running and as usual very few taxis or Ubers around. I eventually got into one that had trouble managing the overnight road closures that plague Paris prior to the Olympics and ended up reaching home by 2am…. Resulting in an overall trip duration of 11 hours, longer than flying to Seattle or Réunion Island!
While this long trip allowed to finish in one go The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik, and hence the Scholomance trilogy, which was definitely below par when compared with the previous novels, maybe because it was taking place out of the boarding school, and hence barely sufficiently engrossing to cut the airport noise and visual pollution at bay (but with the side effet of me believing I had lost my wallet for a few minutes), I was still tired enough the following day to fail to finish a local evening 10k, dropping out after 5k (and 19’26”, which was a great time but impossible to sustain for another 5k…) The Athletics Championships were definitely and already far away!
three decades back
Posted in Kids, Travel with tags airport, Alicia Dickenstein, Cayenne, Chicago, flight, Guiana, Guyane, Mont-Saint-Michel, Orly, Purdue University on October 25, 2021 by xi'an
Yesterday, I (we) found myself (ourselves) back in time, precisely 34 years ago, as we drove our daughter to Orly airport for her flight to Cayenne, French Guiana. And the start of her internship. Indeed, this is also the airport from which I left for Purdue University in 1987 and where my parents drove me then, more for sentimental reasons than out of necessity, as I had much less luggage than Rachel! This old airport has not changed that much, apart from the sharp increase in security restrictions. At the time, my parents were able to stay till the plane to Chicago left (two hours late) and watch it take off from the terraces of the airport. This time, we were just unable to enter the airport beyond the parking lot and watched the plane take off (one hour late) from a flight tracker! But overall there was the same bittersweet feeling of seeing one’s kid move (far) away for a major and exciting step in their professional life. (When I called my mom to watch for the plane flying west straight across Normandy, very close to our family roots, she reminded me of that and also of my grand-parents watching my plane flying by… Without a flight tracker! I actually remember spotting Mont Saint-Michel on that trip.) Fare well, Dr. R, and see you soon!
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