A reader has contacted La Voz to report the lack of medical services at César Manrique-Lanzarote Airport after her 72-year-old stepfather died of a heart attack while waiting in the security line.
The man and his wife were waiting in the security line around six in the morning, as they had a flight to Madrid. At that moment, the man fainted. "My mother called me running and since I work at the facilities, I ran to where they were and the security employees attended to my stepfather very quickly and put him in the emergency position," she says.
However, the big problem came when they called the ambulance around 6:15 AM, barely five minutes after the fainting spell. "The ambulance didn't show up until 7:05 AM even though the hospital is very close to the airport and at that hour there's hardly any traffic... my stepfather was lying on the floor for 45 minutes," he says"What broke my heart the most was that when the ambulance arrived, the two technicians arrived as if they were visiting a museum, they treated the emergency at their own pace, it's something we didn't understand... the security personnel and Aena were pressuring them to hurry, but everything was done slowly," he continues.In this regard, he recounts that the technicians "performed all the protocol they said, but we knew it hadn't been a drop in blood pressure." "I told them that I wasn't a doctor but that I believed **they weren't giving it the importance it had** and that they should hurry... they made my stepfather get up by himself and get on the stretcher, they told him it was a drop in blood pressure," he continues.
"He's an older man, so he had to go to the hospital quickly... and this isn't the first time something like this has happened at the airport because I've experienced it myself," she states. Finally, that day the man passed away in the hospital due to the heart attack he suffered.
Therefore, it demands that Lanzarote Airport have a permanent medical service for these types of situations where response time is crucial to save lives.
