Russian rocker kicked off flight for odor dies of disease he called 'very smelly'
Andrey Suchilin, the man who caused an international flight to make an emergency landing last month because his body smell sickened other passengers on the plane, has died.
Suchilin, a well-known rock musician in Russia, had been battling the tissue disease necrosis in a Portuguese hospital for the last month, according to RT, a Russian television network. He was 59.
Lidia Tikhonovich, identified alternately as his girlfriend and wife by media outlets, kept fans updated on his condition with Facebook posts over the last few weeks.
On Monday she posted: "Andrei's gone. Alas."
"The tragic and comic component of this story is: I (caught) a disease that ... makes a man very smelly," Suchilin wrote on his Facebook page on May 30, the day after he was removed from the Transavia Airlines flight.
The plane was traveling from Spain to the Netherlands when pilots made an emergency landing in Portugal after passengers "began to vomit and faint because of the smell," according to Newsweek.
Belgian passenger Piet van Haut told The Daily Mirror that the smell was "unbearable."
"It was like he hadn't washed himself for several weeks," Van Haut said.
Suchilin was removed from the plane and taken to the hospital, Newsweek reported. The next day he wrote on Facebook that his health insurance had expired and that he and Tikhonovich were stuck in Portugal. "... being here like this without money, consulate support and medical care, it's not clear how to live," he wrote.
The rocker had been had been vacationing on Gran Canaria, one of Spain's Canary Islands, RT reported.
Tikhonovich wrote on Facebook that a doctor in Spain told him he had an "ordinary beach infection" and gave him antibiotics.
But his condition worsened in Portugal, where he had several operations to try and stop the infection. On June 2, Tikhonovich wrote that surgery hadn't worked and that he was in a medical coma. He got sicker as the necrosis invaded his kidneys, heart and lungs, according to People.
Necrosis kills living tissue through low levels of oxygen, according to Medical Daily. It can be caused by a number of things, including frostbite, deep vein thrombosis, improperly treating a wound, or infection, the medical news site writes.
In severe cases, a person might lose a limb or organ because tissue has died, Medical Daily explains.
RT reports that doctors were never able to pinpoint how Suchilin got it.
He was one of the pioneers of rock music in the Soviet Union, considered one of the best guitarists in the country, RT reported.