MDA israel

Shortly after 8 am, we are called for a confirmed corona patient with severe difficulty breathing. The patient is hospitalized in an emergency hospital which is situated in an underground bomb shelter. It was set up to deal with the all-out war we are facing.

While on our way to the incident, we hear ambulance after ambulance looking for a hospital which will take their patients and they are sent far from the city to Ichilov, Belinson, Tel Hashomer, or maybe not because they are also full. Dispatch tells us that if our patient is unstable and in life threatening condition, we cannot take them to a hospital in Jerusalem, but  that the managers will do their best to try and help us be able to take them to the closest hospital.

It’s not that they don’t want to receive patients, it’s simply that they can’t. They don’t have anywhere to put another patient. They don’t have any space on the floor. They don’t have another bed in the ICU. I know that they want to help, I have known these people for years and know how much their patients matter to them. They want to, but they simply can’t.

We enter a large hall, there are lines of beds lining the walls with patients lying there in various states of consciousness and respiratory states, there are medical professionals in PPE from head to toe who are practically running from patient to patient.

Our patient is lying there unresponsive, using every ounce of strength to bring in air to his failing lungs despite the illness. But he is powerless against it.

We perform CPR alongside the team at this facility, all of us together are doing CPR when we know there is little chance of success. How can we give up? He’s only 73 and came in a couple of days ago on his own two feet.

Time of death is called.

Baruch Dayan Emet.

We go to the nearby MDA station to restock and have barely finished cleaning the ambulance when we are called back to the same facility. The same facility which literally was established to handle the pandemic, for yet another corona patient with severe respiratory distress.

We haven’t even made it in the door yet when were greeted by the head nurse who tells us “Wait. Don’t go to your patient, there’s another patient crashing right now. Go to her first!” We pass the original patient, lying there, she’s breathing relatively well and her oxygen levels are fine.

We get to the patient who is crashing. She’s cyanotic (blue) and failing to breathe. And once again, we start CPR, once again, with the staff at the facility who has been living this hell for weeks. Once again, we fight and once again we lose.

Time of death is called.

Baruch Dayan Emet.

On our way out, we see the new patients waiting to be registered. Our first patient is lying in his bed covered, while a new patient is waiting next to his bed to take his place. He will take his place after the body is moved.

Another patient comes, and yet another, and yet another, and the teams register each one and finds a space for them. “it has been like this for weeks. One goes downhill and another comes in his place”, the nurse tells me. She adds, “four died during my night shift”, and all I want to do is give her a hug through our stifling PPE and tell her that it will be ok, that it will pass, that I know that she and everyone else here are doing everything that they can.

I have seen a lot in my time as a paramedic, maybe even too much some will say. I carry the scars in my soul (and on my body) from horrific terror attacks to which I responded. But, when my grandchildren ask me what I remember the most, I think I will tell them about today.

The day that I stood in the bomb shelter, in full protective gear, losing patient after patient to an invisible enemy, the first day I felt defeated.

I am constantly asking myself how you all out there don’t see what’s happening?! How do you not see what this horrible disease is doing to us?!

But, then I remember that you have no way of seeing it. How can you see it when it’s just me Masala, Chen and Yoni underground trying to save another person? How?

I implore you, do as much as you can to protect yourselves and others.

I implore you to help us and yourselves take control of the situation.

This is all of our lives and at the moment, you have the power to save it.

This is what collapse looks like.