A man passed out at a traffic light. A MDA medic happened to notice and saved his life.
Sometimes the work of a Magen David Adom medic doesn’t end when their shift ends. That was the case when Ilai Shetrit, an ambulance driver, was heading home one afternoon from a shift in Kiryat Ono and saw that the car ahead of him at a traffic light did not move forward when the light turned green. Shetrit realized that the car’s driver was unconscious and quickly intervened along with two MDA colleagues, bringing back the driver’s pulse en route to the hospital. The MDA team recently paid a visit to the patient’s home where he was back on his feet and happy to receive the visitors.
After trying to catch the attention of the driver in the stopped car ahead of him by honking his ambulance’s horn, the perceptive Shetrit realized that something was amiss, got out of his ambulance to check on the driver of the other car, and saw that he was unconscious. Shetrit called MDA which immediately dispatched a Mobile Intensive Care Unit (MICU), and in the short time it took for the intensive care vehicle to arrive, Shetrit began resuscitation and administering three electric shocks with a defibrillator on the unconscious driver, a 60-year-old man named Igor Nudelman.
“I’m used to always being on alert if someone needs medical help around me,” Shetrit said, “but this was really a special case.”
Soon, paramedics Hadar al-Maqais and Fadi Hamdan arrived in a MICU and gave Nudelman four additional electric shocks with the defibrillator. Nudelman regained consciousness in between the electric shocks, but his pulse was soon lost again. Al-Maqais and Hamdan took Nudelman to the hospital while resuscitating him, and his heart finally began beating again.
Nudelman invited the MDA team that saved his life to visit him at his home in Ramat Gan so that they could properly meet for the first time. This time, Nudelman warmly greeted them, standing alongside his family.
“I am very lucky that you were behind me with the ambulance, you were alert, and knew how to act in this situation,” said Nudelman to Shetrit at the joyful reunion.
“I am very happy to see that you have returned to the life you had before the incident,” Shetrit replied. “It’s a great privilege for me that I was in the right place at the right time.”
“Another person could have just gotten angry, gone around my car, and not even noticed that I was unconscious,” said Nudelman. “It was the right place at the right time and with the right person. Thank you for saving my life.”
