airplane obs x2

[deere]

I was on a plane a couple weeks ago, and had an aisle seat for an hours-long flight.  Wasn't exactly looking forward to being trapped in a sealed tube with that many strangers during cold-and-flu season...but I hoped maybe I'd get a few good obs out of it.  Nobody sneezed that I noticed, but I did see some coughing and nose blowing.

Coughing: One row in front of me was a whole family that was sick.  The kids were coughing, the dad was coughing a bit, but the mom was the sickest.  Maybe in her mid-thirties, and they looked/sounded like they may have been from Mexico.  A bit after takeoff, she had a coughing fit that went on intermittently for probably half an hour.  Tight, painful sounding coughs- the kind that sound like there's congestion that isn't quite ready to move yet.  Her husband across the aisle kept reaching over to rub her back.  Very sweet, especially for as miserable as she looked and sounded.

Nose-blowing and tissues: Across the aisle from me was a good looking woman, maybe in her late 20s.

I noticed her sniffling and blowing her nose a bit when we were boarding, and a few times over the course of the flight.  But near the end, she started blowing and wiping it more with a tissue- I'm guessing she'd taken some medicine that was wearing off.

Around when they announced the final descent, I noticed she was wiping her nose a lot- I think over and over with the same tissue- while trying to finish watching a movie on her tablet.  At one point, I saw she stopped even wiping, and just held the tissue under her nose for about five minutes, only removing it as we were landing and she was going to need her hands free again.

[Travel]

Ugh, I feel for that family. I'm glad the husband was trying to make her feel better. I can't imagine having a cold while in the air. It's already bad enough for me because flying messes with my ears. Add to that the congestion you might feel with a cold and it sounds like hell on Earth. I mean. Hell in the Skies.