Margaret Cho has shared her own experience of having diarrhea on a plane following last week’s viral incident, where a flight was forced to turn around due to a passenger’s extreme diarrhea.
The actor and comedian took to TikTok to share her story on Wednesday (6 September), where it has since been viewed over 600,000 times. "Diarrhea on a plane? I’ve had it," she immediately jumped into telling the story.
“It came with gas,” she continued. “I kept going up and down and going to the bathroom and then sitting back down. And the smell was so bad, but also not human, that other people near me started to think there was something wrong with the plane.”
The comedian explained that the passengers had varying theories, thinking that “something was burning” or that jet fuel was leaking. They began to look around and panic before deciding to tell the flight attendants.
According to Cho, she decided not to speak up and instead put in her AirPods. “I dissociated, I put my AirPods in,” she said. “I just watched as people started to panic and look around.”
Many people in the comments section called an incident like this their “worst nightmare”.
“This is my nightmare. Glad you made it out,” one comment read.
Other people in the comments wrote about their own experiences delaying a plane. “Me too. Right before take off. They wouldn’t start the plane until I got out of the toilet. They almost kicked me off the plane. Customs checked me,” one individual admitted.
“When I was 17 I flew home from Paris and vomited so hard into a sick bag it broke the bag and got on the person’s shoes across the aisle,” another person wrote while trying to sympathise with Cho.
Some people explained what preventative measures they take to avoid the same thing happening to them. “Us IBS girlies take pre-emptive imodium before flights,” one commenter explained.
“I eat very lightly on the day of a flight for this reason. I hate the bathroom on a plane,” another suggestion read.
Cho was inspired to share her story after a Delta flight was forced to turn around last week after a passenger on board suffered diarrhea “all the way through the plane”.
The flight from Atlanta to Barcelona was two hours into its journey when the pilot asked if he could turn back.
In a video clip from LiveATC.com, posted on X (formerly known as Twitter), one of the pilots is heard confirming the incident to air traffic control, saying: “It’s just a biohazard issue, we had a passenger who had diarrhea all the way through the airplane so they want us to come back to Atlanta.”
After arriving back at the airport, the plane did not take off again for five hours in order to clean up the mess.
One X user commented under the posted clip and claimed both he and his wife were on the flight. He said: “Both my wife and I were on the flight. It was a mess. The pilots made the right decision to turn around. The ground crew ripped out the carpet and put new in. Considering the circumstances, the ground crew did a great job, along [with] the attendants and the pilots.”
