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Comedian Margaret Cho confessed that she has her own diarrhea plane story.
Following a viral incident in which a Delta flight to Spain had to turn around because a passenger’s diarrhea caused a “biohazard,” Cho, 54, fessed up about having a similar experience.
In Cho’s video, posted to TikTok on Wednesday, and currently viewed over 570,000 times, she said, “Diarrhea on a plane? I’ve had it…I kept going up and down and going to the bathroom and then sitting back down. And the smell was so bad, but also not human, that other people near me started to think there was something wrong with the plane.”
Cho said that the other passengers got alarmed, thinking there might be something wrong with the jet fuel. They were so worried that they alerted the airplane personnel.
“I dissociated, I put my AirPods in,” Cho said. “I just watched as people started to panic and look around.” She said she was so mortified, she didn’t see how the flight attendants explained the situation.
In the September 1 incident that prompted Cho to share this anecdote, a Delta Airbus A350 flying to Barcelona, Spain, made a U-turn and returned to Atlanta where it had departed to be cleaned due to a “medical issue” on board.
“We’ve had a passenger who’s had diarrhea all the way through the airplane, so they want us to come back to Atlanta,” a pilot told air traffic control.
“Our teams worked as quickly and safely as possible to thoroughly clean the airplane and get our customers to their final destination,” a Delta spokesperson said. “We sincerely apologize to our customers for the delay and inconvenience to their travel plans.”
“It was an experience that I hope no one has to go through,” passenger Marie Beals-Basinger told the Daily Mail. “I hope the poor woman that had this experience recovers.”
“It was pretty bad,” fellow passenger Dee W wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “The vanilla-scented disinfectant used on it only made it smell like vanilla s–t.”
Another passenger, Xansby Swanson, who originally posted the footage from the flight, said his brother who was a fellow passenger found the situation hilarious.
He said he hasn’t “laughed harder than his phone call to me explaining why he was still in America. He said it was the funniest thing he’s ever experienced.”
The sick passenger’s name has not been made public, and aside from Cho, others on TikTok have come to their defense.
“If I was this person I’d be completely mortified, cause like me personally, I’m not gonna laugh at something that I know that could easily happen to me,” one TikTok user said in a viral video.
The comments on Cho’s video was also filled with fans sharing similar experiences.
“I take 2 Imodium before every flight I’m literally so paranoid about this,” one fan commented on Cho’s TikTok.
“I delayed an entire flight thanks to airport pizza when I was 12,” another person wrote. “I’ll never get over it and I’m 39.”
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