Well it ended up, as what i have heard is a pretty common phenomenon, a very busy Yom Rishon. I showed up in the morning and both Shai and Or (two local volunteers) were there. I talked with Or a little bit and watched many local youth volunteers show up for a weeklong training in central Israel. They showed up with their bags packed for the week, you could see the different personalities in the amount of luggage they brought, some a rather large amount of stuff for a week, others a backpack and roller bag. It was right around 8am that the first call came in and I went out on the Ragil with Anas and Yaccov.
The first call was to a fainting. When we arrived at what looked like a warehouse, we walked into an office where a man was laying on the ground with his legs propped up (in proper treatment for shock). I took the man's blood pressure and it looked good. There was some back and forth between the man and Yaccov about going to the hospital but eventually with some help we got the man into the bed and loaded in the ambulance. Blood sugar was taken, again in the okay range and so we transported the patient to the hospital.
The next call took us out to a village somewhere between Akko and Karmi'el. We were called to pick up a boy at a clinic that had abdominal pain. So after loading him up and his parents we were off to the hospital.
After transferring the boy to the pediatric ER room (one that I didn't even know existed until this trip), we got a call for chest pain. We arrived on scene and the guy who called got on the ambulance but then there was some discussion and he said he didn't want to go to the hospital. So he got off the ambulance and we went on our way.
The next call came a little bit later. We were called to the old city of Akko for someone unconscious. When we arrived the patient was conscious but seemed to me like he was in a altered level of consciousness. We loaded him up and transported him to the hospital. When we arrived we were met by a supervisor paramedic which was doing quality checks on ambulances today. He observed what we were doing and spent sometime with Yaccov asking him some questions. After we transferred the patient and Yaccov was done with the review process we were driving back to the station where we came upon a "car accident." It was less than a finder binder and after we stopped and walked back to see what was going on, Yaccov ended up just telling them to take it off the road so they weren't in the middle of traffic.
Our next call was to someone who was threatening to hurt themselves. As we were responding to the call we heard over the radio that we were canceled. So back to the station.
When we got back I joked with Anas that we would get a call in 3 minutes because it was 2:37pm and the transition to the next shift happens at 2:45pm. So the calls right in the last few minutes are the worse because you know you're not getting back in time to leave your shift on time. About a minute later we get a call, I then continue to joke about it being on the fifth floor and all the other things that make for a horrible call. The call was for an older lady who had broken a bone a long time ago and needed to go to the hospital. It wasn't the fifth floor but it was up some flights of stairs. So we got her in the chair and carried her down the stairs. Got her in the bed and then made the slow journey to Haifa where she wanted to go. The ride was hard on her because of the pain and her daughter did her best to help alleviate it with blankets and moving positions but it is a tough thing to do on an ambulance traveling down the highway. After transferring her to the hospital we made the long journey back to Akko. We ended up getting back around 5pm. A busy but long day.
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