A Day in The Life of a Plumber/Medic
My name is Joshua Strahl, I live in Beit Shemesh with my family and I am a plumber. I also am a volunteer EMT with United Hatzalah of Israel. Yesterday, an incident took place, that reminded me of how lucky I am to be an EMT and be able to give help to those who need it. It is a story of being in the right place at the right time.
I was working when I received a call from a client asking if I could help them clear a blocked kitchen drain that had been backing up and causing flooding. “Sure. No problem,” I tell them. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” I finished up the job I was doing and headed over to the location of the next job, the backed-up kitchen drain.
As I was driving up Nahar HaYarden Street I notice that in the car behind me was another volunteer EMT from United Hatzalah. We were in the same EMT training course. We waved at each other and the next moment we both received an alert on our phones that told us that we were the closest responders to a medical emergency.
The dispatched emergency read: “Traffic accident involving a pedestrian. Location: Nahar HaYarden Street number 47.” I radioed to the dispatcher that I was less than 200 meters away and en route.
I pulled into the bus stop and grabbed my medic vest. Shockingly, I’m the second volunteer on the scene. A young schoolboy perhaps 10-years-old is kneeling on the grassy median crying. These are good signs. He’s conscious, alert, not paralyzed. He was grabbing his shoulder and head and when I came up to him he told me that they both hurt a lot.
The first EMT on the scene was taking an oral history and asking for the exact details what happened while I performed a preliminary exam. The boy’s shoulder was scraped up and he had a small cut on his trapezius. There was no bleeding. I wrapped the shoulder in a sling to immobilize it and we carefully lay him down and put a cervical collar on.
At that moment I noticed that there was a bit of fluid leaking from his ear. This is a sign of CNS trauma. It was imperative that we prevent as much movement as possible so as not to aggravate the injury.
The police arrived a few minutes later and secured the scene. When the ambulance arrived we helped get the boy on a backboard and onto the ambulance for immediate transport to the hospital.
But our job wasn’t over yet. There’s someone else who needs our attention: the driver of the car. She was pretty shaken and was very worried about the schoolboy. I asked her how the accident happened. She, practically in tears, said that the boy ran out across the street from between two busses and that she had no time to react.
Because the front of her car was angled down she actually scooped the boy onto the hood as opposed to running him over. Her windshield was cracked where the boy’s head had impacted it.
She was very scared as she watched the schoolboy being secured to the backboard and put on the ambulance. I calmed her frazzled nerves and reassured her that the doctors will thoroughly care for the schoolboy and that I believe that with the grace of God he will be okay.
I was somewhat late for the clogged kitchen sink, but that’s par for the course, and in truth, its just another day in the life of a plumber-medic.
