Joining the mile-high club has never been so difficult, if events of the past week are any indicator. By now we all know about David Dao, the doctor forcibly removed from United Flight 3411 out of Chicago; we’ve seen the video, read the reviews, saw United Airlines stocks drop precipitously. The Real World News Network is here to blow the cover off the untold story of Candace Lemley, seat 24B.

“It was just,” she coughed out, through tears. “awful. The worst experience of my entire life.” Candace was already having a bad enough day, having to sit in the middle seat from Chicago to Louisville, KY. She strove to weather the two-hour delay with grim determination, but the breaking point was when the man next to her was asked to leave the plane.

“He had already been taking up the entire arm rest,” explained Lemley. “I’m one of those people who needs both arm rests, or else my neck gets so strained and the pillow only does so much, you know?”

Dao, the physician who ended up being forcibly removed, was seated in 24A. As the enforcement agents approached, Lemley was first confronted with the eerie feeling that she herself was to be taken. “I’m just one of those people that these things happen to,” she explained. “My cat, Beatrice, was stolen by my neighbor Carol and the police sided with her, if you can believe that.”

Once things began to escalate, Lemley began to wish it had been her. The enforcement officers reached over her in an attempt to remove Dao, and elbowed her in the process. Lemley was roughed up as collateral damage, and has yet to be reimbursed by United for her inflatable neck pillow that was popped. “I never would have acted the way [Dao did]. I was going to Lousiville to visit my cousin Sherry who is going through just the most horrendous divorce right now – Rick left her for their nanny and Charlie is only six years old so just imagine how she feels, I couldn’t not go.”

Clutching her deflated neck pillow to her chest and holding back sobs, Lemley recounted how the blood from the doctor got on her Nordstrom Rack chemise, which is now completely ruined. She is currently being evaluated by Chicago area nurse practitioners to identify if anything in her knee was torn as Dao was dragged over her and onto the floor of the aircraft.

“I just hope the next time they want to forcibly remove someone next to me, they have the decency to upgrade me to first class,” Lemley concluded with a sigh.

While the country contemplates the implication of this kind of violence against an individual passenger, Lemley is a grim reminder that no incident exists in a vacuum and the repercussions of such events are yet to be fully understood.