Oklahoma cardiologist Dr. TJ Trad was fast asleep on his flight from Uganda last month when a member of his team woke him up to say someone needed a doctor.
Trad rushed over to the passenger who needed help to find a man drenched with sweat and complaining of chest pain. The man looked at the doctor and anxiously asked, “am I going to die?”
“Not today,” Trad told the man.
He believed that the man in front of him was having a heart attack – pain the doctor was intimately familiar with after surviving one just last year.
Trad also knew he had the tools that might help save the man’s life if it was a heart attack: medication and medical devices he had on him because he was flying home from a medical mission trip in Uganda with Cura for the World – an organization he founded that builds clinics in areas of need.
He also had a pocket-sized electrocardiogram, or ECG – something he never leaves home without after his own heart attack. The device, about the size of a credit card, would be a crucial tool in understanding the man’s symptoms.
Now he just had to get to work.
It was three hours into the April 29 KLM flight to Amsterdam when Trad was thrust into emergency response mode.
The patient said that on a scale of one to 10, his chest pain was at a 10.
“Do we land right now?” Trad recalled the man’s wife nervously asking.
Trad realized the first step was to calm down the Dutch couple, nearby passengers and flight crew.
“I think our training is so extensive that you almost get trained to be the captain of the ship and to calm everyone around you,” he said.
Trad then created a makeshift emergency room across a row of airplane seats, laid the man down with airplane pillows and propped his feet up to bring blood back to his heart.
After ruling out blood sugar and blood clot complications, the doctor used a 12-lead ECG from the medical mission trip to assess whether the man was having a heart attack. He quickly gave him five medications typically used to treat heart attacks.
Trad then used his personal ECG – an electrocardiogram that measures the heart’s electrical activity – to help monitor the man’s heart for abnormal beats, or arrhythmias. Trad has kept the device, a KardiaMobile card, in his wallet ever since his heart attack last year in case he has another cardiac event.
“The later manifestation of a heart attack is an arrhythmia. That’s how people die,” Trad explained.
Although the 12-lead ECG was crucial to confirm the man was showing symptoms of a heart attack, the doctor said the card allowed him to continually monitor for arrhythmias in the three hours that followed.
The man put his thumbs on the card, and it transmitted data on his heart activity to Trad’s app via Bluetooth.
Within 45 minutes after he took the medication, the man’s chest pain and heart rate started to get better, the doctor said.
Trad’s own heart attack had prevented him from going on his medical mission trip to Uganda in February 2024, leading him to go on a make-up trip that put him on the same plane as the man he helped save.
The doctor said his heart attack led to him being in the right place at the right time.
“I believe everything happens for a reason, I truly do,” he said.
During the ordeal, the pilot asked if they should divert the flight to Tunisia after speaking with the KLM on-ground physician, but Trad assured the crew that the patient was stable enough to make it to Amsterdam.
“We had a nurse that was taking his vitals every 10 to 15 minutes… and we had him hooked up to all these things… if we would have landed in Tunisia, they wouldn’t have done anything differently other than obviously taking him to get a heart cath,” Trad said, referring to the catheterization procedure that allows doctors to examine or treat the heart and coronary arteries.
The man was stable throughout the remaining two hours of the flight. His chest pain returned as the plane was about to land, but additional medication resolved it, Trad said.
The man’s wife told CNN that Trad and a nurse helped prevent her husband’s condition from getting worse and did an “unforgettable job.”
Once they landed, the man thanked the doctor and his wife hugged him “very, very tight.”
“She said that you’re our angel in the sky,” Trad recalled.
KLM told CNN the plane landed safely at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, where an ambulance was waiting to take the man to a nearby hospital.
The man’s wife said he is doing reasonably well considering the traumatic event. The hospital examined him for 12 hours and did not diagnose him with a heart attack, stroke or pulmonary embolism, she told CNN.
Trad believes this could be because of his timely treatment of the patient.
After having to cancel his Uganda trip last year because of his own heart attack, Trad said that helping save this man feels like a full circle moment for him.
He told the man it was a pleasure taking care of him and wished him the best before he ran to catch his connecting flight home.
