A selfless doctor saved an elderly passenger's life mid-flight by sucking 800ml urine out of his bladder.
The incident happened on a China Southern Airlines plane that departed from Guangzhou, southeast China on November 19.
It was six hours away from the destination, New York, when the pensioner asked for urgent assistance as he was unable to urinate.
Cabin crew found the elderly man breaking out in a cold sweat so they made an emergency announcement asking for any doctors on board.
Dr Zhang Hong, who is head of vascular surgery at the First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University, identified himself and offered to help.
Hainan People’s Hospital vascular surgeon Xiao Zhangxiang was also present, according to China News .
Dr Zhang assessed the situation and said: "The pensioner's abdomen was bloated, he could not sit still and was sweating a lot.
"He was going into shock and may have suffered a risk to his life if we didn't tend to him urgently.
"His family said he had a history of prostate enlargement, so we suspected this was causing urinary retention."
The pensioner's bladder was at risk of rupturing and urgently needed a solution to pass the urine out of the body.
The doctors improvised a makeshift catheter using a plastic tube from a portable oxygen cylinder, a syringe from the plane’s first-aid kid, a plastic straw from a milk carton, and some tape.
With consent from the patient's family, Dr Zhang inserted the device into the bladder but soon discovered that the syringe needle was too thin and could not extract the urine.
Risking infection, Dr Zhang decided to suck out the patient's urine using his mouth and the tube.
He repeatedly spit the urine into the empty wine bottle during the life-saving procedure.
He spent 37 minutes and extracted roughly 800ml of urine from the patient.
Dr Zhang: "There was no other way. I didn't think too much about it.
"I only wanted to help him extract the urine retained in his bladder.
"Saving lives is a doctor's instinct."
