A woman openly confessed to causing a United Airlines flight cancellation after she spent an hour and a half wreaking havoc in the plane’s small restroom due to severe diarrhea and vomiting.
Meghan Reinertsen, a writer and actor, said the nightmare journey happened about a year ago when she was coming home from Portugal.
She first experienced symptoms, later identified as food poisoning, at Newark Liberty International Airport, right before she was about to board her connecting flight to Indianapolis.
“Something is brewing. Something is happening that I am not prepared to deal with,” she shared in a TikTok video that has garnered nearly 20 million views.
Despite her reservations, she boarded the plane and ‘hoped for the best’.
She spent the next 30 minutes in her window seat crying, sweating profusely and writhing in abject pain. The plane eventually took off.
Throughout much of the ordeal, she remained seated due to the seatbelt sign being on, but she recalled the story of a woman on a Delta flight who had an accident in her seat mid-flight.
“I couldn’t let that happen to me,” she explained. “I made it to the bathroom, and for the next 20 minutes, I experienced more diarrhea than any human should ever have in their life.”
Meghan Reinertsen, a writer and actor, revealed to millions that her severe diarrhea episode was the sole reason a United Airlines flight was canceled while she was in the air.
While she was in the bathroom, she began feeling the urge to throw up 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 wheeled Reinertsen 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
United Airlines confirmed to Metro that this incident happened in July 2024
‘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 to Metro that this incident happened in July 2024.
‘This incident occurred in July 2024. 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,’ a spokesperson for the airline said in a statement.
