Personal Stories

The best way to understand what it is that we do, is to hear some of the actual cases that we have been involved with.

These stories all happened in Tel Zion itself, and therefore the names and some details have been changed to protect the privacy of the patients.

• "Not so sweet!" (Choking Child)
   
• "Just in time" (Childbirth)

"Not so sweet!" (Choking Child)

On a Friday afternoon, just after 1 o'clock, we received a message that a 2 year old child was choking. Once the brain doesn't get oxygen for more than 3 minutes, irreparable damage starts to take place. This kind of call is one of the most urgent and also the most scary because almost all our volunteers have small children. As we do not as of yet have enough 2-way radios, everybody who got the beeper message started to run.

Yaakov was just in the process of saying good-bye to a friend when he felt his hip vibrating. He started jumping down stairs 3 at a time, without even looking back to say anything to his friend. The friend understood what was happening! Since the place of the call was all uphill from where he was at the time, Yaakov then had to start racing up around 200 stairs to get to the correct road. That took around a minute, and by the time he got to the right road he was out of breath. At this stage he still didn't know if anybody else had responded to the call, so he had to keep going as if nobody else was on his way.

15 seconds later he had run/walked to the right house and went looking for the right apartment. The door was open and when Yaakov arrived there were a few other volunteers already crowding into the small living room. It soon became clear that there was a kindergarten in the apartment, and the teacher had given all the children a hard sweet as a treat. This child had bitten it in half and then accidentally swallowed both pieces which got stuck in his throat. The child had fallen over from lack of oxygen, but as he was falling, the pieces of sweet came out by themselves. 2 minutes after the initial call, 10 volunteers had arrived at the scene. Once the ambulance arrived, they took the child to the hospital to make sure there was no damage to the lining of the throat.

The lessons to be learned from this call were that better communication is needed to know what is happening at the scene and how many volunteers have responded. Also, even though there were 10 volunteers on the scene immediately, only one of them had life saving equipment with him. More equipment is needed urgently to solve this problem.

"Just in Time" (Childbirth)

4:45am. Shimi is sound asleep and doesn't expect to get up for another half hour. But he is on call. Bzzzzz! Childbirth in the area. In a flash his clothes go on over his pajamas, his beeper and phone are stuffed into their holders, he grabs his id vest from its hook, and is racing down the stairs to wait for the ambulance outside his building. The driver who just finished doing the same early morning "gym", picks him and another first aid volunteer up and they are on their way to the call in under 4 minutes!

The expecting mother had been on the way to the hospital in Jerusalem by herself with her husband but their car broke down just outside our community of Tel Zion. The short wait feels like hours to them as they wait impatiently for the Tel Zion ambulance to arrive. When Shimi and co. arrive, the husband urgently informs them that it is their fifth child, and that the mother is known to give birth very quickly. "Wonderful!" they all think to themselves. The crew quickly loads up the couple and their belongings, and after informing local security to take care of the car, start driving as fast as possible to the hospital. After checking blood pressure, heart rate and the amount of oxygen in the blood, Shimi starts to time the length of the contractions and interval between them. "Duration- 50 seconds, interval- 2 minutes." The driver looks back at Shimi in his mirror and presses harder on the accelerator.

3 minutes before reaching the hospital, the mother casually remarks to her husband that she can feel the baby starting to push to come out. Shimi quickly insists that the new mother and the baby please wait a few more minutes. The driver radios ahead to the hospital to have some nurses and a midwife ready and waiting in the parking lot. On arrival, the woman is whisked into the emergency room for a quick checkup. Shimi sighs in relief at not having to deliver a baby on the side of the road.

The end of the story is that the midwife decided that there was enough time to go upstairs to the delivery rooms, while the patient had to be convinced not to give birth in the elevator. The driver hadn't yet finished filling in her details on the ambulance forms. Before getting her address, he hears a tiny wail- its a girl! Talk about a close call!