Reinertsen, a nanny and budding actress, explained that she was traveling from Portugal back to the US for a film premiere when “a disturbance deep, deep” in her bowels ignited.
“Something is brewing,” she remembered thinking. “Something is happening that I am not prepared to deal with.”
That something was food poisoning.
It was a nasty, not-so-little bug the belle picked up after eating an undercooked hamburger the night before her flight.
Although food poisoning is rarely fatal, according to the Cleveland Clinic, symptoms of the illness, including vomiting and diarrhea, can feel deadly.
An Etihad Airways passenger had to be wheeled off the aircraft after eating a “smelly” in-flight meal and throwing up over two dozen times during a six-hour “flight from hell.”
And a recent Delta Airlines flight from Detroit to Amsterdam was forced to make an emergency landing in New York, when several passengers exhibited signs of food poisoning from the reportedly “spoiled” grub served while at 30,000 feet.
Luckily for Reinertsen, her rumbling belly didn’t cause the plane to make an unscheduled stop. It did, however, stop her fellow passengers from using the bathroom.
“I’m full body sweating, I’m crying, my insides are cramping,” she recalls of the moments leading up to the explosion, adding she feared a public accident would erupt if she didn’t high-tail it to the toilet — even though the seatbelt sign was still illuminated.
“I couldn’t let that happen to me,” said the hapless sweetheart, who then admitted, “for the next 20 minutes, I have more diarrhea than any human should have in their life.”
Amid her pooping nightmare in the cramped airplane commode, vomit also sprang up, prompting Reinertsen to call a flight attendant for help.
After barfing in a bag provided by the cabin crew member, Reinertsen remained in the lavatory, spewing and defecating, for the duration of the flight.
The attendant informed her that the next trip the Airbus was scheduled to make had been canceled.
Reinertsen was ultimately wheelchair-escorted off the plane, which was then parked for deep cleaning, and left to fend for herself at baggage claim.
Sadly, her misadventures didn’t end there.
She also suffered from another round of diarrhea in her hotel bed.
But the shame of soiling the establishment’s sheets apparently didn’t compare to the embarrassment of grounding an airplane.
“They canceled that flight because of me. The hazmat team [had] to come in and clean it, because [they didn’t] know if I’d brought [a disease] back from Portugal,” Reinertsen groaned.
“I am a biohazard,” she self-deprecatingly teased. “I am patient zero.”
