On Friday just before noon, Roey Ido, a United Hatzalah volunteer EMT was at home getting ready for Shabbat, when his emergency communication device began to sound alerting him to a medical emergency taking place nearby. Without hesitating, Roey dropped what he was doing and rushed to his emergency electric bicycle which he left parked outside his house.
Roey met another United Hatzalah volunteer EMT, Ron Weitzman, as he arrived at the scene of the emergency just a few blocks from his home. As they ran up the stairs into the building where the emergency was taking place they found a woman in her 80’s lying on the ground unconscious. After quickly checking for vital signs and finding none, the pair of EMTs launched into CPR in an effort to save the woman’s life. They were joined shortly thereafter 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 the ambulance arrived and the paramedic on the ambulance administered medications and the team managed to bring back the woman’s pulse and stabilize her. The woman was taken to the hospital with a pulse and with assisted breathing.
But Roey’s weekend of lifesaving efforts wasn’t done. On Saturday night, just after 10:00 p.m., Roey responded to yet another medical emergency with an unconscious woman in her 80s. This time, Roey also found the woman unconscious on the floor with no vital signs. He initiated CPR and shortly after he did so a mobile intensive care ambulance 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 and were 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 in the weekend. “For weeks I don’t have a successful CPR case and now I have two in one weekend. When it rains it pours sometimes and that is just how things are. With hard work and quick intervention, we can be successful at saving lives. That is what we do and I am proud that we managed to bring the pulse back of both of these women. Even if it turns out to be that they were revived for a short time, we did what we set out to do and we succeeded. I hope that the help that I gave makes a difference for these women and their families.”
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