Dodgy stomach and a tiny toilet on a busy plane – a recipe for holiday disaster.
American TikTokker Meghan Reinertsen can confirm there is nothing worse than suffering diarrhoea and vomiting 30,000 feet above the ground.
The nanny and aspiring actor shared her humbling travel experience she endured last year, trapped in a United Airlines toilet with a bout of food poisoning she had caught on a holiday in Portugal.
She took to social media to reveal how she endured ‘more diarrhoea than any human should have in their life’ during a two-hour flight from Newark to Indianapolis.
She left the toilet in such a state after the poo incident that the airline had to call in a hazmat team to clean after her, with the plane grounded and the next flight cancelled.
Now Meghan, 29, from Atlanta, Georgia, has revealed what food was the culprit for the soul-destroying saga.
The suspected dish, which triggered the explosion in her stomach, was a few bites out of an undercooked burger patty.
She told Daily Mail: ‘I had eaten part of an undercooked burger hours before I left to get back to Indiana.
‘I only took a couple of bites because I was like, “oof, that’s really undercooked”.’
Meghan had enjoyed the burger at the resort where she was staying with the family she worked for as a nanny.
Trouble began brewing in her gut when she landed at Newark, New Jersey, for her last connecting flight after crossing the Atlantic.
She said she felt ‘a disturbance, deep deep’ just before boarding the plane.
The illness escalated quickly, leaving her writhing in her seat with ‘full body sweating’ and ‘cramping.’
Determined not to soil herself in front of hundreds of other people, she rushed to the toilet and barricaded herself in for the next one and a half hours.
With stuff shooting out of both ends, Meghan was allowed to stay in the toilet cubicle even during landing.
She said staff told her that a haz-mat team rolled in later to clean the insides of the plane in case ‘I brought something back from Portugal.’
‘I’m a biohazard, I’m a patient zero,’ Reinertsen added.
Despite the nightmare experience, she insists that she is far from embarrassed.
She said: ‘Is this a funny story in hindsight? One hundred percent. This is so something that would happen to me.
‘Even in the midst of the pain, I was like, “of course this would happen to me”. I didn’t really have time to be embarrassed. I was just like, “oh this sucks”.
‘People (on the plane) aren’t monsters and they knew what was going on.’
‘We choose what we decide to be embarrassed by and this simply wasn’t something I was embarrassed about.
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