For a full year, 31-year-old Nitzan Raz had been living with persistent chest pain. One evening, his wife urged him to get checked out by a doctor and he finally agreed. While he was on his way to the doctor the following morning, Raz suffered cardiac arrest while he was still in his car, causing his vehicle to collide with a parked car nearby.
When Magen David Adom received the emergency call, it was logged as a road accident. A team led by MDA paramedic Amit Gabbay rushed to the scene. What they found told a different story. The car crash had not caused the emergency, it was the emergency. Recognizing immediately that Raz showed no signs of life, the team began administering CPR without hesitation, deploying a resuscitation device in their effort to revive him.
Shortly after, an MDA intensive care unit arrived, with paramedics Terry Goodman Yanai and Mohammad Matar joining the effort and continuing advanced CPR. After four electric shocks delivered by a defibrillator, Raz’s heart began beating again and he was rushed to the hospital.
A few weeks later, once he was recovered and back at home, Raz came face to face with the team that brought him back to life. “I am here today thanks to the MDA team who came and saved my life,” he exclaimed. “I want to thank them, the Lubavitcher Rebbe who gave his blessing to miraculous medicine, and the Holy One, blessed be He.”
“When I arrived at the accident, I expected to find a minor fender-bender,” reflected Gabbay, the MDA paramedic, at the joyful reunion. “When I saw that Nitzan had no signs of life, I acted immediately and did everything I could to save him. After four shocks from the defibrillator, his heart beat again and I knew he would get to go home to his family. It makes every hour I invested in training to become a paramedic worth it.”
