Woman left mortified after going on a rant about Fiji’s ‘terrible’ health care system on plane – before realising who she was actually speaking to
An Australian nurse was left red-faced after crashing Fiji’s healthcare system on a plane, only to find herself sitting next to the Pacific island’s prime minister.
Queensland repatriation nurse Millie May Ettenfield told the excruciating story in a video posted to social media that has been viewed more than 500,000 times.
“You want to hear the best story in the whole damn world?” Ms. Ettenfield asks her listeners in the video posted on November 16.
She then explained how she travels the world to “pick up sick people and bring them back home.”
Australian repatriation nurse Millie May Ettenfield has told an embarrassing story about a plane trip where she was stuck with the wrong couple to manage health care in Fiji
On one such job, she was flying back to Brisbane from Samoa via Fiji when she noticed that she and another “beautiful couple” were the only people in business class.
She said the man was “dressed up, wearing a suit and looked like a million bucks,” as did the woman who “looked perfect.”
Mrs Ettenfield noticed the couple ‘throwing back the champagnes’ and she joined them as she told the woman what she was doing.
When Mrs. Ettenfield heard that the couple were from Fiji, she told them “the healthcare system is so heartbreaking’.
“Then I spent half an hour to 40 minutes saying how traumatic the health care system is and how sad it is,” she said.
While we asked the woman ‘how can we let people live like this?’ she noted that the man “listened but was not engaged.”
Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka (pictured with his wife Suluweti Tuiloma) listened intently to the tirade against his country’s healthcare system
“Mind you, I still drink champagne,” said Mrs. Ettenfield,
“I’m probably just ruminating about how bad the health care system is.”
After the conversation ended, she said the hostesses came up to her and asked her to take a photo of them with the couple.
She said it wasn’t until the plane landed that she asked who the man was.
“He doesn’t want any trouble from me, he gives me a pat on the back, like I was quite annoying and to be honest I probably was,” she said.
‘Suddenly I said to his wife: ‘Who is this man?’.’
‘At first the woman said, “Oh, that’s nobody.”
“And then all of a sudden he says, ‘I’m the Prime Minister of Fiji,'” Ms Ettenfield said.
“The Prime Minister of the country I just spent 45 minutes talking about how bad the healthcare system is.
‘We got off the plane and he said, “Nice to meet you Millie”.’
Ms Ettenfield said she still ‘hasn’t recovered from the shame’.
Fiji’s Prime Minister is Sitiveni Rabuka, who was elected to head a three-party coalition in late December for his current term.
As a colonel in the Fijian army, he staged two military coups in the 1980s.
A 2018 global review of healthcare access and quality ranked Fiji 131st out of 195 countries, showing that it performs below the international average.