A nanny whose ‘biohazard diarrhea’ on board a United Airlines plane triggered flight cancelations has revealed why she is happy she went through the painful ordeal.
Meghan Reinertsen, a 29-year-old actor from Atlanta, Georgia, spent 90 minutes locked inside the lavatory during a July 2024 flight from Newark to Indianapolis.
Following her unfortunate ordeal, where ‘more diarrhea than any human should ever have’ came out of her, she took to TikTok to tell her then-53 followers all about it.
Now, she has told the Daily Mail she is glad the incident happened because her experience has helped others deal with their own embarrassing, mid-air health matters.
‘I’m happy that I have been able to make people feel better about their own situations,’ she said in an exclusive interview.
‘That’s all I have ever wanted to do with my writing and entertainment. It’s been really uplifting and encouraging for me.
‘I have had an egregious amount of people reach out to me with their own plane horror stories, which I love to hear,’ Reinertsen said.
As well as prompting others to open up about their own embarrassing stories inside cramped airplane bathrooms, her story boosted her TikTok audience to a staggering 93,000 followers.
Meghan Reinertsen, 29, from Atlanta, Georgia, said she spent 90 minutes locked inside the lavatory during the July 2024 flight from Newark to Indianapolis
After surviving the unfortunate ordeal, where ‘more diarrhea than any human should ever have’ came out of her, she took to TikTok last month to tell her then-53 followers about her painful trip to the bathroom
Reinertsen revealed that the horrifying explosion was triggered by a few bites of a bloody hamburger patty, which gave her violent food poisoning.
‘I had eaten part of an undercooked burger hours before I left to get back to Indiana,’ she said.
‘I only took a couple of bites because I was like: “Oof, that’s really undercooked.”‘
Reinertsen said she bought the burger at the resort where she had been staying as a nanny for a family who were on vacation at the time.
‘I don’t want to out the resort,’ she said. ‘It was a really nice hotel.’
Reinertsen said the first signs something wasn’t right came while she was strolling through the airport before her final connection, a two-hour flight.
‘My stomach was rumbling,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘I was like: “This is… different.”
‘But it really wasn’t until I got on the second flight that the pain kicked in. I was like: “This is not good.”‘
In her TikTok video about the nightmare experience, she detailed how within 30 minutes into her flight, she was drenched in sweat, crying and doubled over in pain.
Reinertsen revealed that the key mistake that triggered the horrifying explosion was taking a few bites of a bloody hamburger patty, which gave her violent food poisoning
Fearing she’d end up like the infamous Delta passenger who soiled herself mid-flight, Reinertsen made it to the bathroom just in time.
‘For the next 20 minutes I had more diarrhea than any human should ever have in their life,’ she said, adding that she soon started vomiting as well.
Reinertsen recalled panicking in the tiny, claustrophobic area before she had the presence of mind to scream for help from the flight attendants, who gave her bags.
The flight crew allowed her to stay in the bathroom for the entire flight. They even got special clearance from the pilot to allow her to remain where she was for landing.
Reinertsen said she couldn’t make it back to her seat in her condition, which prompted the flight attendant to tell her through the door to ‘brace for impact’.
Once they were on the ground, she was told that the next flight with that plane had been canceled.
‘A flight attendant comes over and says: “Everybody’s off the plane now, go ahead and take your time and come out when you can, the next flight has been cancelled,”‘ Reinertsen said. ‘In the moment, I’m not thinking it is because of me.’
The flight attendant then told her that a hazmat team would be coming to clean up her mess.
‘I’m happy that I have been able to make people feel better about their own situations,’ she exclusively told Daily Mail. ‘That’s all I have ever wanted to do with my writing and entertainment. It’s been really uplifting and encouraging for me’
‘Got it, so you canceled that flight because of me…because you don’t know if I brought something back from Portugal. And I am a biohazard. I am patient zero,’ she said.
She even had to be put in a wheelchair when she was ready to disembark because she couldn’t walk.
Reflecting on the ordeal one year later, she told the Daily Mail she can ‘absolutely’ see the humorous side.
‘Is this a funny story in hindsight? One hundred percent. This is so something that would happen to me,’ Reinertsen said.
‘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,’ she added.
Despite the ‘overwhelmingly positive response’ to her story, Reinertsen said she was also heavily criticized by trolls.
The flight crew allowed her to stay in the bathroom for the entire flight. They even got special clearance from the pilot to allow her to remain where she was for landing
The flight attendant then told her that a hazmat team would be coming to clean up her mess and the next flight on that plane was canceled
‘There are obviously people who are nitpicking my every move and decision,’ she said.
‘I only had two hours to get to my flight, I didn’t have time to really think about it.
‘I didn’t have a moment to stop and make a decision about it because I was just trying to make my flight.’
Reinertsen also dispelled rumors that she ‘destroyed’ the plane bathroom.
‘That simply wasn’t the case,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘I successfully got all of my bodily fluids into the appropriate place. My clothes were fine. People have been asking about that.’
