A 45-year-old Bnei Brak man last month experienced two clinical death episodes and lived to tell about them thanks to a joint lifesaving initiative by Magen David Adom and Shamir Medical Center that put a heart-lung bypass machine on an ambulance. . . .
Within one minute and 50 seconds of the patient’s collapse, the person who called MDA was performing CPR under the MDA dispatcher’s direction. Within three minutes of the call, MDA first responders were at the scene administering cardiac shocks from a defibrillator to restart the man’s heart.
And within five minutes, an MDA Mobile Intensive Care Unit (MICU) was at the scene, initiating the patient’s transfer. At the same time, a second ambulance, a special ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) unit equipped with a heart-lung bypass machine that MDA and Shamir Medical Center installed several months ago, also raced to the scene.
Soon after the MICU team initiated the transfer, the patient’s heart stopped for a second time and MDA decided to transfer him to the ECMO ambulance, providing him with a better chance of arriving at the hospital with his brain and organs fully oxygenated. . . .
He regained consciousness the next day, looking amazingly well, and recorded a thank-you video to MDA for saving his life.
“I remember going to work and then waking up in the hospital and I didn’t understand what I was doing there,” he said. “I was told I had already been in the next world, and thanks to the angels of MDA and Shamir Hospital team, my life was saved.”
The ECMO unit installed on an ambulance is a game-changer, according to Dr. Shafir Botner, senior paramedic and head of MDA’s paramedic training program. This makes Israel one of the few countries in the world — along with the United States, Britain, France, Australia, and the Netherlands — using ECMO technology outside a hospital setting.
“It buys the paramedics time, enabling them to work smartly and without the sense that time is ticking away because they know they don’t have to worry about the patient’s brain and other organs being deprived of oxygen,” Dr. Botner said.
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