Communication

Saturday, July-24-10

Yesterday morning was a great shift. There were four of us in the ambulance; a driver who I had never been with before, an Israeli volunteer, and two of us chulniks. The nicest thing about this shift was that the two of them really respected us. The older volunteer was 34 and is studying towards a Ph.D in history and had less MDA training than us, so the entire day he was opening to learning more and not showing us up. It was a sweet atmosphere with actual intellectual conversations for a change and it made the day really enjoyable.

First we checked the entire ambulance and now that we’ve been there a while they trust us to fill out the paperwork ourselves. We were then sent on a אבטחה-avtacha (translates to security/protection?) by the police. I don’t really know what it translates directly to in English, but it’s when we get sent to an event or game or something and wait on standby in case someone gets injured. So we begin driving out to these sand dunes and they tell us we’re going be on standby while swat detonates a mortar bomb. It was pretty neat to see. We were chilling in the ambulance at a very safe distance away and then there was a BOOM and a cloud of smoke went up in the air, about the size of a tennis court. 10min later the police and swat cars drove out of the sand dune, said good morning and that was the end of that. I guess detonations are pretty routine for them, but it was a different experience, especially something that I would probably never see at home. Just as we drove into the city we got our next call. It was for an overdose, so we rushed there not knowing what to expect. We arrived to a middle-aged woman lying in bed, seemingly fine just complaining of weakness and dizziness. Our driver begun talking to her and this is when I first learned how thorough he is with patients, it was refreshing to see. Turns out she had depression and other psychological programs and took 7 times the normal dose of her antidepressant medication. We took her to the hospital and later our driver told us that with the drug she took and the dose, it wasn’t so much a suicide but more likely attention seeking behaviour, kind of sad. Our next call was for a man with stomach pains or so we figured. We could only imagine because this guy was a relatively new immigrant who only spoke Russian and not one word of Hebrew or English. After his neighbours tried to help us, we kind of gave up and just took him to the hospital. At least Russian is a pretty common language to come across in Israel so plenty of doctors were able to help him out. Thinking back, it was really frustrating not people able to communicate at all and it really made me appreciate how easy it normally is. I mean this guy didn’t understand anything, not even what ‘water’ or in Hebrew ‘מים-mayiim’ was. Without being back to the station from the start of the shift we went on to our next call. It was to be תגבור-tigboor (reinforcing?) for another team. We got there and saw two other ambulances outside and were thinking, oh no, what could they possibly need another ambulance for. Turns out this woman weighed 170+kg and they needed to carry her down 2 flights of stairs. As you can probably imagine I wasn’t too helpful and I carried the equipment. Since we didn’t receive the original call, weren’t responsible for the transfer to the hospital and went on with another call. This was for a homeless man lying in כיכר מגן-דוד-Kikar Magen-David (Star of David Square). For those of you who have not visited Israel this intersection is insane, especially on Friday afternoons. 6 streets meet and look like the Magen-David or Star of David (hence the name) and it is also where Shuk HaCarmel (the outdoor market) and Nachlat Binyamin (the artist market) begin and is just down the road from Dizengoff Centre, a major shopping centre. So we finally manoeuvred around all the people and got to the man who was lying on the side of the road and of course was just fine. Although he did have the most terrible sores on his legs that I had ever seem. Almost like small craters of his skin were missing, it was disguising but there wasn’t anything we could do, he need long term treatment, so we advised him to do so and left.

Finally we got back to the station for the first time all day with an hour left in the shift. We were waiting it out, just talking to people who were coming on for the next shift and we got one final call. We headed out to the south part of Tel Aviv which isn’t the nicest part of town. It was a call to a small shop and when we got there this woman was sitting on the floor screaming at the staff. From what I could gather she was sitting on a stool in the store that broke under her and she hit her head when she fell. She was fine medically, but making a huge scene, screaming that she was going to call the police and so on so we got her out of there quickly and did one of the quickest complete transfers to the hospital and got out of there as possible. It was 15min after our shift was supposed to be over after all. We said goodbye to our driver and the other volunteer and I think the same four of us will be working together Sunday night, which I’m really looking forward too. Otherwise the weekend has been full of relaxing and hanging out with friends. Hope everyone is having a great weekend. I apologize for slacking with the posts.