I’d just gotten off a flight from Las Vegas to Chicago, and only had a moment to grab something to eat before my next flight to New York. I made a beeline for Tortas Frontera and ordered the usual. I was starving. It had been a long day.

I got on board the empty plane for my next flight, and stowed my rolling bag in the last overhead bin in coach — the official crew bag location. In 10 minutes I’d start breaking the ice, meaning setting up the galley. In 15 minutes we’d start boarding.

I was just about to plop down in an empty seat to take a couple of quick bites of dinner when I noticed … something.

Vomit. All over the seat. All over the floor. All over the in-flight magazines, the safety briefing card, and an (unused) airsick bag. I called the captain.

“That’s strange, nobody wrote it up,” he said after checking the log book. “I’ll call the cleaners.”

I know Ebola can only be transferred through bodily fluids from an infected person. Most of the cases have come from Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, and the likelihood that the sick passenger on this domestic flight — whoever they were — had traveled from one of those places on this plane was slim to none.

And there you have it…. RT @UKTransplant1 @Heather_Poole More people in America have been married to a Kardashian than have died from Ebola

— Heather Poole (@Heather_Poole) October 28, 2014

Still, it crossed my mind. Of course it crossed my mind.

Two cabin cleaners came on board. One was wearing blue rubber gloves and carrying a spray bottle of disinfectant. She went to work spraying everything in sight — but first she handed those in-flight magazines from the seat pocket to her partner. Who wasn’t wearing gloves.

Not good, I thought, staring at her bare hands.

A few minutes later the woman holding the contaminated SkyMall discovered even more vomit. In the bathroom. All over the walls.

Bet it happened upon landing, I thought. Why else would it have gone unnoticed? Unreported.

“Must have been the Rockies,” said an agent walking briskly down the aisle to the back of the plane, where we all stood staring at the woman with the spray bottle. “We always have sick passengers on these inbound flights.”

The cabin cleaner’s gloved hand now held the bathroom door handle. She leaned against the door and held it open for me to take a peak inside.

“That look OK?”

“Oh … uh … sure,” I said. It did look okay.

But that gloved hand on the handle was an entirely different story.

Before I could say anything the agent determined we were good to go and announced she was sending the passengers down. She had a plane to board and there was no way she was taking a delay.

I watched the cleaners walk up to first class and then off the plane. I couldn’t help but notice the woman still had on the blue gloves, her hands touching a couple of seats on her way out.

“@nycjim: Clorox sees 28 percent jump in sales amid growing fears about #Ebola.” // What about Purell? Gloves? Which reminds me…Gotta pack

— Heather Poole (@Heather_Poole) October 18, 2014

Passengers get sick all the time on flights. It’s perfectly normal. It’s why there’s an airsick bag in the seat pocket in front of you. What’s not okay is when I’m passing through the cabin and somebody silently hands me a bag of … wait … what is this? A little heavy. Kinda warm.

But that’s another story.

Anyway, maybe the agent was right. Maybe it was the Rockies. Maybe it was food poisoning. Maybe it was too much alcohol the night before. Or the flu. Who knows.

That’s the problem with my job as a flight attendant: I just don’t know what might be going on when I encounter a sick passenger. But I did know that day that I was 99.9% sure the mystery vomit did not come from a passenger with Ebola.

My how things change… RT “@BrianEub: @Heather_Poole My biggest fear on planes has always been sitting in the middle seat.” #Ebola

— Heather Poole (@Heather_Poole) October 27, 2014

That said, I bet all those passengers on that Frontier flight were surprised to learn they’d been on a flight with somebody who had Ebola.

The week before on a flight from Vegas to New York, a passenger threw up all over himself the moment I rolled the beverage cart to his row. It got all over the floor and inside his shoes. I handed him a plastic bag to wrap them up inside, and when we landed he deplaned barefoot. (Another reason to keep your shoes on.)

Now I had a pretty good idea why he was sick: We were returning from Vegas, after all.

Still, I had to ask the question, one I’d never asked before, which seemed somewhat silly on this particular route. As to not freak anyone out seated nearby, I started with, “Did you have a little too much to drink last night? Have a virus? Come from Sierra Leone, Liberia … Guinea?”

“I’m more afraid of the flu,” people tell me whenever I tweet something about Ebola.

Oh, I bet you are, since that’s what most people on the ground who work in offices and sit in little cubicles are most likely to encounter.

I, on the other hand, come into contact with a lot of people. One hundred and sixty passengers multiplied by three flights a day — that’s at least 540 passengers a day.

The odds of your sitting next to a sick passenger are pretty low, but the odds of me cleaning up after a sick passenger are a wee bit higher. That’s why I get kind of defensive when people accuse others of overreacting.

It doesn’t help when some idiot sneezes on the plane and then jokes that he’s got Ebola.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned working as a flight attendant, it’s that people don’t want to follow the rules. I’ve seen passengers take other passengers’ bags out of the bin to make room for their own. I’ve paged for doctors on board during medical emergencies only to have people ring their call lights — not to offer help, but to ask if this was going to affect their connection.

Don’t even get me started on the seat belt sign.

I’m always surprised to see some passengers grab other passengers dirty cups & hand them to me. That’s nice and all but…but….

— Heather Poole (@Heather_Poole) October 27, 2014

But when it comes to Ebola, there’s no getting around how important the rules are. If I ever come into contact with a sick passenger who has recently returned from one of those three countries and sporting a fever and or throwing up, I will not think twice about putting myself under house arrest.

The recently-returned nurse who was held in New Jersey seems to think the mandated quarantine is an inconvenience. She may or may not have had a fever — depending on who you ask, the thermometer used — the day she arrived at Newark airport.

Quarantines seem like a small price to pay for an extra measure of safety. The CDC says Ebola can survive on dry surfaces, such as doorknobs and countertops, for several hours; but in bodily fluids like blood, the virus can survive up to several days at room temperature.

After the mystery vomit I started practicing good Ebola-prevention techniques — just in case. I found a box of thin white rubber gloves and stowed them in an easy to grab location. Still, I forgot to put them on the next time I was picking up trash in coach. Whatever, I decided. I wash my hands. A lot.

“Where are your gloves?” asked a passenger when I passed by her with a bag full of trash.

I laughed, “Gloves? I don’t need no stinkin’ gloves!” Or did I?

She thought I did. So did her husband, a doctor, who sat across the aisle from her. She told me about how her daughter is also a flight attendant, with an airline that recently had an Ebola scare, and how careful they all are now.

“Everyone wears gloves,” she said. “Everyone.”

Not a bad idea. RT “@kk074: @Heather_Poole what’s next? Hazmat suits in Sky Mall? #ebola”

— Heather Poole (@Heather_Poole) October 27, 2014

“Aren’t you afraid of Ebola?” my neighbor asked last week. It was a little neighborhood get together and I had mentioned I had to work the next day.

“Well of course I’m a little worried,” I told her. “But I’m not afraid to go to work.”

That’s the truth. (But check back with me in a few weeks.)

Heather Poole is a flight attendant for a major U.S. carrier, and the author of the New York Times bestseller “Cruising Attitude: Tales of Crashpads, Crew Drama and Crazy Passengers at 35,000 Feet.” You can follow her on Twitter at @Heather_Poole.

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