A North Texas man says he is outraged that airport security agents at Dallas Love Field strip-searched his wife and handled her feeding tube.
Melinda Deaton has a four-inch medical tube sticking out of her stomach. The medically implanted tube is needed for treatment after complications with a gastric bypass surgery.
Deaton frequently flies from Dallas to Minneapolis for treatment at the Mayo Clinic. She said Transportation Security Administration agents strip-searched her and touched her feeding tube Wednesday morning when she was on her way to three days of treatment.
Her husband, John Deaton, said the incident was unusual.
"They will see it on their screens, ask her what it is, she'd identify it, they may pat it on the outside of her clothing, accept it and go on," he said.
But that didn't happen Wednesday morning.
Even though she was wearing a medical bracelet with a USB drive on it that contained notes from her doctor, TSA agents still searched her.
"They had physically stripped her and saw the tube coming out of her stomach, and they decided that they needed to check it for explosives, so they had to physically handle the tube," John Deaton said.
Besides handling the tube, agents swabbed it for bomb-making material, Melinda Deaton said. Her husband said it put his wife at risk of infection.
Read more at NBC.
