A Visit to Jail

Wednesday, July-14-10

Last night was one of my best shifts of the summer so far. I’ve learned that your driver can either make or break your shift and last night I was with two of my favourites, the same driver mentioned in ‘Is the Whole Team Here? – כל הצוות פה?’ and another medic who I hadn't actually been with yet but who I’ve met before and is always so friendly at the station. Our first call turned out to be one of my most interesting calls yet. It was to police station and we weren’t really told what was for. We arrived and one of the guards took us through the back halls of the station to the cells/holding area and let me say this is nothing like the front of the station. It is beyond gross here, no air conditioning and it stinks of urine. We get to the back and there is a man sitting in a chair in apparent distress. He is breathing fast, sweating, and saying that he has stabbing chest pains. I take his blood pressure and expect it to high but it turns out to be normal. After we open the oxygen our driver decides to call for a נט''ן-Natan (ICU ambulance) and then whispers to us, ‘it’s an HY”. It took me a minute to realise that HY referred to hyperventilation, but then I understood. He was just making a performance to get out of jail for the night. Finally the נט''ן-Natan came and decided to take him to the hospital to be safe. Now the policemen are getting really frustrated that now they have to accompany him to the hospital and one of them says, “why are you taking him, he’s a rapist, and raped someone today”. After I heard that all I could think was that I’m just so relieved I didn’t know that before. They tell us that we’re supposed to treat everybody equally, but I’m not so sure I could have. Maybe if he was truly having a heart attack, but after that call felt kind of guilty, like we had helped him get a night out of jail and there is someone with their world torn apart because of what this guy did to them. It was definitely a situation I will remember.

After that call we got our next right away. It was to the side of the road for a man who was not feeling well. He must of being a regular because he just knew to just hop in the back. He tells us he took some sort of drugs that morning and wanted to go to the hospital. So we take him and when he finds out that he won’t be getting a bed he decides to leave and walks off. Although that call was pretty pointless we did see our rapist from before and yep, he looked just fine without oxygen or any IVs surrounded by his guards. We finally got to go back to the station and within 20min we get another call. An 80 y/o man who’s feeling weak. Not exactly the kind of call we were too happy to be woken up for but we go. And then we’re half way there and of course it got cancelled, i.e. now we have time to get our middle of the night shwarma, it was sweet. In the middle of eating our shwarma we get our next call, a drunk who’s passed out on the side of the road. Drive by, wake him up, ask if he wants to go to the hospital and when he says no we get out of there. That call was more of a bother, like couldn’t the 6 people standing around him have woken him up? Anyways now we are really looking forward to maybe getting some sleep at the station when we get yet another call. This one is for a young woman who is having a migraine and had been throwing up. I felt bad for her especially because there wasn’t really anything we could do besides turn off the ambulance light and take her to the hospital. Now the sun is beginning to rise and we have barely been back to the station all night when we get our final call. It’s all the way in Ramat Gan to help another team carry a lady down the stairs. It was quick and we got back to the station in perfect timing for the shift to end.

This was probably my busiest/sleepless overnight shift, but they drivers made it so much fun so it didn’t matter. I guess I was really tired after these past 3 shifts in 2 days because when I got home I slept from 8am-5pm, the longest I’ve slept after any overnight shift. This evening all of us in Tel Aviv met as usual to make up our schedule for next week and the program coordinators came to visit and see how things have been going. Now I have no idea how I’m going to be able to sleep tonight before tomorrow’s morning shift, but now that we’re getting down to our last 2 weeks or so I’m trying to get in as many shifts as possible.