Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Mada 2nd Post

Hey everyone--

Sorry I couldn't finish the post before. Talmud class doesn't wait for bloggers :)

Again, you probably shouldn't read if you don't like graphic detail.

OK so I ended with the riot/broken nose guy. Cool. We get a call for another man who had fallen. We rush to his house. When we get there, I took the ambu bag and oxygen tank. Alex took the chair. Yitzack and Shira took the papers and such. We get to the entrance to their apartment and his son is waiting there calling for us. We entered the apartment and saw a man recinding against the bottom of a couch. There were a ton of blankets/sheets/pillows all around him. We took his BP and talked to him about what happened. He said he didn't remember much, but he wasn't feeling well. He was drifting in and out of consciousness. His pupils were extrememly dialated. His blood pressure was rapid and weak. He didn't remember much. Any guesses? Seziure. We got him dressed, and of course against his wishes got him into the chair and out the door. Yitzack and Alex carried him into the ambulance. We transfered him into the bed. We didn't feel he needed to be carried from one to the other, and neither did he. When he stood up, he almost immediately fell down. I caught him before he hit the street. He would have hit it hard. We got him in, flipped on the emergency lights and drove quickly to Terem again. In the drive, he started to become more and more conscious. By the time we got there, he was putting coherent sentences together and didn't even need us to wheel him in the bed into the hospital. When he got to the front desk, he made a huge deal that he was fine and he didn't want to be there. He made Shira call his son, who he thought was his brother, to talk to him in English. The guy wouldn't let her talk in Hebrew for some reason. We left shortly after.

We then got a call for a guy named Danny. Apparently he calls all the time. We get to the house, I start to get the things and get out when Yitzack says "don't worry, he'll get in himself." We saw him walk out of the house, lock the door, walk up the stairs, open the back door of the ambulance, say hello and ask for the classical music station. We brought him to Terem, and he was immediately brought back to his house. It was pretty funny.
He then called again an hour later, and we got him again. This time, he was standing on the corner of the street and fell asleep in the ambulance ride to Terem. He loved the classical music station.

The next guy was the scary one. We get a call for a dehydrated man. I thought "this shouldn't be too hard." Little did I know. He was an 88 year old, ultra-orthodox man. He was sitting on his bed when we went into his room. He skin wasn't pale. It wasn't very pale. It was chalk white. Chalk on a chalkboard white. There were a ton of red/purple/black bloches all over his skin. And his feet were about 3 time as big as they should be. They were both deep purple and extremelyyyyyyy swollen. When I saw them, Yitzack quickly said in a calm voice, and English, "don't react." I tried my best not to. I looked at his arms, shoulders and hands. He literally was skin and bones. You've seen pictures of the starving people in Africa? Try seeing it in real life. He literally looked like a skeleton that was being held somehow by his skin. Yitzack and the helper of the house had to help get him into his diaper before dressing him with new pants and socks. After about 30 minutes with this guy, who ever 5 minutes would say "tzit-tzit kippah, tzit-tzit kippah," we got him into the chair. I took one arm and Alex took the other while transfering him from his bed to our chair. I actually thought his arm was goign to break off when I lifted him. I didn't see any muscle, or veins, or blood running, or anything. His arms were icy, icy cold. He felt like he had just gotten out of a freezer, it was that cold. We had to drive without the emergency lights because he couldn't have taken the sharp turns and such.
When we got him to Terem and transfered him from our bed to the real one, we found that his pants were absolutely soaked and dripped a lot of liquid onto the floor during the transfer. I wondered, "soaked with what?" I looked at the ground between the beds. I looked at the trail we left through the whole hospital. It was a light red color. Blood. He has completely soaked his pants in blood. Our bed was absolutely drenched in it. It took 20 minutes for Yitzack, Alex and I to clean it off. He soaked the sheet cover and the blanket so much that we needed to take a garbage bag from the hospital and leave them in the bag until we got back to the station. This was by far the most traumatizing call of the day. It was also the last.

There's my story. Hope you all enjoyed.

-Josh

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