Last Friday, just before noon, Roey Ido, a Kfar Saba United Hatzalah volunteer EMT, was home getting ready for Shabbat when his emergency communication device alerted him to a medical emergency nearby. He dropped what he was doing and rushed to his emergency electric bicycle which was parked outside.
Roey met another United Hatzalah volunteer EMT, Ron Weitzman, as he arrived at the scene of the emergency only a few blocks from his home. They ran up the stairs and found a woman in her 80’s lying unconscious floor. After quickly checking for vital signs and finding none, the pair of EMTs launched into CPR to save the woman’s life. They were joined by a volunteer paramedic who was in the area. The team performed a basic life support CPR for over 30 minutes, waiting for a mobile intensive care ambulance to arrive. Their efforts managed to sustain the woman’s blood flow and keep her heart going until an ambulance arrived and a paramedic administered medications, and the team brought back the woman’s pulse and stabilized her. The woman was taken to the hospital with a pulse and assisted breathing.
But Roey’s weekend of lifesaving efforts wasn’t done. On Saturday night, shortly after 10, Roey responded to yet another medical emergency with an unconscious woman in her 80s. This time, too, he found the woman unconscious on the floor with no vital signs. He initiated CPR until a mobile intensive care ambulance had arrived and joined the fight to save the woman’s life. The paramedic from the ambulance team used the defibrillation setting on the heart monitor to help stabilize the patient’s heart rate and after a lengthy battle to stabilize the woman and regain a heartbeat, the woman crashed and her pulse was lost again. Roey and the other responders didn’t give up and shocked the woman again and continued with compressions and assisted breathing until they were finally successful in bringing the woman’s pulse back once more. After she was stabilized they transported her to the hospital for further care.
“Life is like that,” said Roey after the second successful CPR. “For weeks I don’t have a successful CPR case and now I have two in one weekend. When it rains it pours, that’s just how things are. With hard work and quick intervention we can be successful at saving lives. That’s what we do and I am proud that we managed to bring the pulse back for both of these women. Even if it turns out that they were revived for only a short time, we did what we set out to do and we succeeded. I hope that the help I gave makes a difference for these women and their families.”