Amazon CEO airlifted by Ecuador Navy after kidney stone attack

[haele]

12. Well, he could have had a urinary backup that could have f'd his kidney up big time.

or could have developed into a severe infection/toxic shock. Especially if he decided to gut it out for a couple days. A cruise ship is not the same as a hospital, and complications can ratchet up the danger quickly. The ship's doctor would have made the call, and it would not have mattered who it was. The safest thing would be to get him - or anyone else - off the ship as quickly as possible.
We only heard about this because it was the CEO of Amazon. Any other tourist would have been treated the same way. However, the average tourist would not have been whisked off to his or her private jet; they would have ended up in the nearest Ecuadorian hospital that would take foreigners.

This seems to be the week of "way back when" for me - we had to call in the El Salvadorian Navy to airlift one of our LTs who ruptured her appendix when we were on our way to the Panama Canal back in 1980.
We had a large crew, and were assigned a PA Warrant Officer with surgical training and had a fairly complete OR in our sick bay, so we could have stablilzed her for the two days it would have taken us to get to Balboa, Panama and the US Navy base there at the time, but the decision was that it would have been too much stress for her to continue underway with the particular AC system we had, the motion of the ocean and the limited amount of medical resources.

Haele