First Impressions

Thursday, July-08-10

Yesterday’s night shift started off pretty normally. We arrived 15min early, called into the dispatch office and found out our driver’s name and ambulance number. We walked back outside and meet our driver who was sitting outside on the bench with some others. We introduce ourselves; he says his name and tells us we are waiting for one other. Okay, so we wait. Then someone comes out from dispatch and tells our driver that the other person isn’t coming. Our driver actually freaks outs and starts arguing back to this guy, and I translate, “No—this cannot be! Just me and those two, I’m going to ask!” and he gets up and goes inside. This was probably one of the most shocking moments I’ve had at מד''א-MD’’A so far. We were sitting on the same bench as him, and he knew we spoke/understood Hebrew from meeting us not 10min before and he’s talking about us like we are not there. Anyways, he comes out and says to the man, “yes, it is just me and them” and then the two of them start trying to call someone else to come in but no one can. I don’t know if it was because we were going to be two girls alone with him or if it was because we were only volunteers but he evidently had some problem with us. The two of us just looked at each other thinking wow this is going to be a long shift. We wait around for about an hour and then we get our first call. It’s a non-urgent call for a women who is feeling crappy due to side effects of a pill she took. I didn’t understand completely, but her two children were full out yelling at each other. The one blaming the other, saying he told her not to take it that morning and now they are wasting his time. It was quite the atmosphere in that apartment. I also didn’t realise at the time but we were already at the outskirts of Tel Aviv and then she requested to go to a hospital in Petah Tikva. We get there hand her over and head back to ambulance. All of a sudden our driver has done a complete 180. I guess we proved ourselves or something during that call because now he was friendly and talkative as opposed to the complete silence at the start of the call. That was such a relief. Now we head out and get a call from Petah Tikva dispatch. It’s for a male, unconscious lying on a road. We get to outside a fenced in courtyard and two bystanders wave us over and point to what looks like a man lying inside, not moving at all. Our driver jumps the fence gets to the patient and just begins laughing and proceeds to pick up this giant doll that is fully dressed. It was hilarious and the people who had called it in just couldn’t believe it. We headed back to our station in Tel Aviv and watched some TV, chatted, and slept a bit until we got our next call at 4:00am. We don’t even make it to the end of the road before dispatched radioed over that it was cancelled. Drove around the block, parked, and headed right back to sleep. By this time I guess I was really tired because the next thing I knew it was already just after 6:00am and we had another call. ‘Unconscious’ male at the נמל-namal (port). We get to the scene and our driver easily wakes up this guy, so much for unconscious. It was obvious that he has just passed out after a night of drinking. We couldn’t really communicate with him since he only spoke German (a tourist I’m guessing) but he didn’t need an ambulance and walked off. To where, I have no idea I don’t even think he knew where he was. That would be the end of what was quite a quite shift. I was really glad the driver worked out in the end and I'd even like to have him again. I’m also learning to actually sleep on night shifts as opposed to waiting for calls and thinking I won’t wake up so I was much less tired and didn’t end up sleeping near as late into the next day as I have been. This is good too because I’ll be able to get to sleep for my morning shift at a descent time for once. Since tomorrow’s Friday, I think it will be a fairly busy shift and then I’m planning to head down to Nahclat Binyamin—the artist market here that is only open on Tuesday and Fridays. I’ve been meaning to get there for the last month so hopefully my shift doesn’t run too late.