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13th August 2025
07:55am BST
A woman who suffered diarrhoea severe enough to get a whole flight cancelled has issued an apology to her fellow passengers.
Meghan Reinertsen took to TikTok to tell her tale, in which she declared that she "single-handedly" managed to get a flight out of Indianapolis cancelled.
“If that flight cancellation changed the trajectory of your life in a really negative way, I’m so sorry," she said. “But it wasn’t without pain and suffering.”
In the clip, which has been viewed over 20 million times, Reinertsen explained that she was flying from Portugal to the US when she felt a “a disturbance deep, deep” inside her bowels.
“Something is brewing,” she recalled thinking. “Something is happening that I am not prepared to deal with.”
Turns out, the actress and nanny was suffering from a nasty bout of food poisoning.
She had ate an undercooked burger the day before her flight, and it was coming back to bite her - big time.
After landing in the US, she boarded another flight, run by United Airlines, and things took another turn.
She said she had to dash to the loo during takeoff - despite the seatbelt signs still being illuminated - in order to not have an accident.
“I couldn’t let that happen to me so for the next 20 minutes, I have more diarrhoea than any human should have in their life,” she said.
“I’m full body sweating, I’m crying, my insides are cramping,” she recalled.
She then started to be sick too, and, after alerting a flight attendant, was given a bag to do so in.
Reinertsen made such a mess in the plane's toilet that its next scheduled departure had to be cancelled, with specialist cleaners in hazmat suits being needed to give the plane a good deep cleaning.
“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,” she concluded.
“I am a biohazard,” she joked. “I am patient zero.”
