The Double Shift

Thursday/Friday, July-1/2-2010

So it is now about 12hrs after my first double shift ended and well I ended up sleeping for well over half of them. Here’s my not so brief recap, a lot happens in 16hrs! We started at 3pm and met an awesome driver. It was also only us with the driver which I have found to be the most enjoyable combination since then there not so much of a hierarchy going on the entire shift. We get our first call which is probably the earliest I’ve ever got a call within starting a shift. It’s a נסיעה רגילה-nesiya regila (regular/non emergency call). Patient is a 30y/o man who hasn’t been feeling well lately, simple hospital transfer. What I liked about this call was that he was an Oleh Chadash – new immigrant so when he ask if we spoke English our driver turned to us and I actually felt very useful. After that we returned back to the station and wow, we were there forever. This shift was so slow! 2.5 hrs would go by before we got our next call. Finally we are called, and dispatch tells us emergency status so we go sirens and all. We are almost there and then we get cancelled! So annoying. We turn around and begin heading back and when we get another emergency call, pretty nearby. Then that call is cancelled too! About 2min after that cancel we get another call and then that one is cancelled as well. This was beyond frustrating, 3 cancelled ‘emergencies’ in about 10-15min. Finally we get a ‘real’ call. A passerby called 101 because a lady was sitting on the curb with her head down in her lap. We get to this ‘emergency’ and the lady is drunk but coherent enough to clearly state that she didn’t want to go to the hospital. Couldn’t this passerby tried to ask her first? I guess not. By this time the sun has set and we get our first Layla Lavan call. Dispatch reads a head trauma. Finally a proper call. We arrive to a pretty fancy outdoor event and someone has tripped and fallen over a cable and is just fine. Basically a liability call and we out of there within 5min. Now it ’s about 10pm and I am bored, hungry, and frustrated. Great position to be in about to head into another shift, but at least our driver is awesome and that really makes a big difference. Next, we are called to the נמל –Namal (port) for two people that have fallen. We get to the first and it’s meet a sweet middle age woman who has tripped over something and has a massive laceration on her lower leg. She didn’t even realise how big it was since it was so dark and I don’t think she wanted to look. Once we got our flash light and peeled off the bandage all we see in blood. The driver cleans some of it away, reveals the cut and we can see her bone! He wraps it up and the two of us take her to the ambulance while they go off to find the other patient. She is an elderly lady who had fallen and probably broken her hip. By this time another ambulance is there and they take her and we are off to Ichilov. We leave Ichilov at about 10:45pm and head to the station since our shift ends in 15min and we have to meet our new driver. Just then we get another emergency call, which of course only after we arrive to the scene gets cancelled. Great, now we are late for our next shift for no good reason.

Part II – לילה לבן-Layla Lavan (White Night)
Being 11:30pm of course we have missed the driver change and no ambulances to be found at the station. We are told by dispatch to wait and that an ambulance is bound to return sometime soon. So we waited…for 2hrs, and nothing. This was so frustrating, because obviously the reason they couldn’t come back to get us was because they had so many calls—which we should have been on! So we decide to take an adventure to Ichilov and meet an ambulance there, we wanted to get on an ambulance tonight! Get there and almost immediately a paramedic says, “are you two the chulnikiyot?” He tells us to call dispatch immediately so we do, and they tell us and that a driver has been alone and coming to pick us up now. Sweet! Within 2min of hanging up the phone our ambulance pulls in with sirens blaring and says to jump in, we have a call! We hop in and meet our new driver, who was beyond awesome and so far my favourite. He is one of the first drivers who I found who actually drives to every emergency call in true emergency fashion and doesn’t waste time everywhere. Between then, about 1:30am and 5:30am we had continuous calls. We actually only took one man to the hospital, who had been hit with two beer bottles and had huge head and leg lacerations. The rest of them we would arrive, the patients would decide to go to the hospital on their own or they would be drunk checks. Typical Layla Lavan calls, nothing epic at all (although we had hoped), but it was an experience in itself just trying to drive around the city with thousands of people in the streets and seeing the sun rise. At 6am we were back in the station and get our last call. A car accident on the highway. We take a man to the hospital with a broken hand and wait there long enough to insure that that would be our last call.

Finally headed home and fell straight asleep. I’m not sure that I will be doing a double shift again anytime soon but I have been told that a regular night shift is much easier since you get to sleep between fewer calls. I guess I’ll see for myself since I have two overnights next week. Just below is a video of how it's sometimes like to drive in an ambulance in Israel. Even with siren blaring most of the time we get very little reaction from the drivers and find that we are the ones have to maneuver around like mad-definitely different from Canada. Enjoy your weekends!