Musician taken off plane over ‘unbearable’ stench dies of necrosis
A Russian rock guitarist whose illness caused an emergency plane landing last month has died, after multiple surgeries at a hospital in Portugal. He was diagnosed with tissue necrosis after a vacation in Spain.
A Transavia flight from the Canary Islands to the Netherlands was forced to land in Faro, Portugal on May 30, after multiple passengers passed out or vomited citing an “unbearable” smell on board. The pilots of the KLM subsidiary opted for an emergency landing after reportedly trying to isolate the passenger responsible for the odor in one of the plane’s restrooms.
One of the passengers, who later spoke to the Daily Mirror, said the smell coming from the unfortunate passenger was “like he hadn't washed himself for several weeks.”
The passenger identified himself on Facebook as Russian art-rock guitarist, Andrey Suchilin, who had been vacationing on Gran Canaria.
“The tragic and comic component of this whole situation is that I caught a disease, which (let’s not say how and why) makes a person quite stinky. As a result, a group of passengers may demand the captain for you to be removed from the plane,” Suchilin wrote.
The embarrassment soon turned to horror, however. What the doctor on Gran Canaria diagnosed as “a simple beach infection,” curable by antibiotics, turned out to be tissue necrosis.
Suchilin’s condition rapidly deteriorated after the arrival in Faro, and the very next day he was placed in intensive care and soon fell into a coma, his girlfriend Lidia Tikhonovich wrote on Facebook.
Doctors were never able to pinpoint the exact cause of the necrosis. Suchilin was fighting for his life for nearly a month and underwent numerous surgeries. On June 25, he died due to the failure of heart, lungs and kidneys. He was 59.
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Suchilin was among the pioneers of rock music in the Soviet Union, and was regarded as one of the top guitar players in Russia. In 1980, his band “Do Mazhor” (C-Major) founded the legendary Moscow Rock Laboratory together with several other artists. In recent years, he had been involved in journalism and sound engineering, also writing music for theater performances.
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