“Is there a doctor on board? There is an emergency on board. If you are a physician please identify yourself to the nearest steward immediately!”

People always ask me what it’s like to have parents who are doctors. I never know how to answer that question. My father is a famous orthopedic surgeon (a doctor who operates on people’s spines) and my mother is a popular pediatrician. People tell me all the time how much my parents have helped them and how amazing they are.

When I was seven years old, our family to a different country so my father could go to a fancy medical school to learn how to fix people’s spines. My mother woke me up in the middle of the night and we got dressed and drove to the airport. I looked out the window of the car into the dark, quiet night and felt my heart flopping around in my chest. That’s how excited I was to go on an airplane and go to a different country for the first time. I squeezed my knees and waited impatiently to board the plane.

After a very long wait in the airport with my baby brother screaming on the top of his lungs, and after our baggage was checked in, and we finished three bags of pretzels and dried fruit and nuts, and we waited for a reeaallly long time on a million lines, we finally got to walk through a big tunnel toward the plane. My five-year-old brother Yehoshua and I tried to run forward, but there were too many people, and my parents kept snatching us back by our collars and telling us to wait nicely. Honestly, I was tired of trying to wait nicely and I was just plain tired, period. It was four o’clock in the morning when we boarded the plane and my brother and I fought over the window seat until we both ended up crying. It was too dark to see anything besides for an ocean of lights when the plane took off, anyway, and we both fell asleep soon after.

A crackly announcement over the plane’s loudspeakers woke me with a start. “Is there a doctor on board? There is an emergency on board. If you are a physician please identify yourself to the nearest steward immediately!”

I looked toward my parents groggily. After all, I was only seven years old and half asleep. My parents exchanged a glance. Yehoshua was sprawled out on the seat next to me, sleeping deeply. Baby Shimmy slept peacefully in my father’s arms.

“Is there a doctor on board?” The call crackled over the PA system again. The voice sounded a little panicky.

Tatty stood up and handed Shimmy to Mommy. A stewardess hurried over to him. “Oh, sir, are you a doctor?” They rushed away together toward the back of the plane.

Five minutes later Tatty was back. “You better go,” he said to Mommy. “A four-year-old girl is having trouble breathing.”

Mommy deposited Shimmy back in Tatty’s arms and followed the stewardess. I tried to peek, but Tatty told me to sit down.

Meanwhile, in the back of the plane, Mommy was desperately trying to help the little girl. She had asthma, which is a condition in which the airways swell up and fill with mucous, making it really hard to breathe.

Usually, people with asthma have special medicine they can take that widens the airways, allowing more air to enter. Unfortunately, this little girl’s medicine was in her suitcase, in the luggage compartment under the plane — totally unreachable.

(Excerpted from Mishpacha Jr., Issue 770)