A United Airlines flight was cancelled after a female passenger suffered an explosive bout of diarrhoea and vomiting that destroyed the aircraft’s tiny bathroom.
Writer and actor Meghan Reinertsen freely admitted she was to blame for the mid-air disaster, revealing she spent an hour and a half locked inside the lavatory during the July 2024 flight from Newark to Indianapolis.
Reinertsen said the nightmare began moments before boarding her connecting flight home from Portugal, when she suddenly felt the first waves of what she later discovered was severe food poisoning.
‘Something is brewing. Something is happening that I am not prepared to deal with,’ she recalled in a TikTok video that has racked up nearly 20 million views.
Despite her fears, she took her seat and hoped for the best — but within 30 minutes she was drenched in sweat, crying and doubled over in pain.
Fearing she’d end up like the infamous Delta passenger who soiled herself mid-flight, Reinertsen made it to the bathroom just in time.
‘For the next 20 minutes I had more diarrhea than any human should ever have in their life,’ she said, adding that she soon started vomiting as well.
She said she panicked in the tiny, claustrophobic area before she had the presence of mind to scream for help from the flight attendants, who gave her bags.
The flight crew allowed her to stay in the bathroom for the entire flight. They even got special clearance from the pilot to allow her to remain where she was for landing.
Reinertsen said she couldn’t make it back to her seat in her condition, which prompted the flight attendant to tell her through the door to ‘brace for impact’.
Once they were on the ground, she was told that the next flight with that plane had been canceled.
‘A flight attendant comes over and says, ‘Everybody’s off the plane now, go ahead and take your time and come out when you can, the next flight has been cancelled,” Reinertsen said. ‘In the moment, I’m not thinking it is because of me.’
The flight attendant then told her that a hazmat team would be coming to clean up her mess.
‘Got it, so you canceled that flight because of me…because you don’t know if I brought something back from Portugal. And I am a biohazard. I am patient zero,’ she said.
She even had to be put in a wheelchair when she was ready to disembark because she couldn’t walk.
‘They had to wheel me off this plane. I can’t walk. They gotta get me in a wheelchair,’ she said.
They wheeled her to baggage claim where she had to endure the shocked stares of all her fellow passengers who undoubtedly knew she was the woman in the bathroom for the entire flight.
Reinertsen said her devastating illness, which persisted days after the horrific flight, came as a result of eating an undercooked hamburger the night before her flight.
United Airlines confirmed the incident to Metro in July 2024, saying: ‘Our flight crew is trained to assist customers in situations like this and helped as much as they could during the flight and upon arrival in Indianapolis.’
