On Thursday morning a little after 8:00 a.m., a man in his 60s lost consciousness while driving with his friends. After succeeding at stopping the car safely at the entrance to Har Yonah, his friends extricated him from the vehicle, laid him out onto the ground, and called emergency services to help.
United Hatzalah volunteer EMT Shimon Vayzer had just finished taking his children to their schools and was back at his home in Har Yonah getting ready to go to work when he received a notification about the unconscious gentleman at the entrance to his neighborhood. The incident was just a 2-minute drive from his house.
Arriving at the scene, Shimon found the gentleman lying on the sidewalk. After quickly checking the man for vital signs and finding none, he immediately started to perform chest compressions and ventilated him with high-flow oxygen. The man’s friends explained to Shimon that he had been complaining about having trouble breathing a few minutes prior and then fell into unconsciousness soon after. The experienced EMT recognized the symptoms as those of a cardiac arrest and continued with the necessary treatments.
As other volunteer EMTs arrived, Shimon continued performing CPR with their help, desperately trying to save this man’s life. After only a few minutes of CPR combined with numerous shocks from a defibrillator, an intensive care ambulance arrived and joined in the effort to save the man’s life. They promptly connected the patient to a heart monitor and administered medication while continuing CPR until the man’s pulse and breathing returned.
Shimon then assisted the gathered team and placed the patient into the intensive care ambulance to be taken to the Italian hospital in Nazareth. Shimon spoke about the early morning resuscitation experience and said, “ It was an extremely stressful situation because we were trying to revive a man who had suffered a cardiac arrest on the side of a major roadway. Performing CPR takes patience and is tedious work and doing it on the side of the road is quite difficult and dangerous. However, nothing compares to the feeling that a person gets after saving someone else’s life. Even though I may be tired from the physical effort, the feeling of exhaustion gets masked by the adrenaline and joy of saving a life. This is a feeling that I am happy to carry with me for the rest of the day.”