United Hatzalah medic saves life of choking baby,
Two United Hatzalah medics who were in the right place at the right time recently saved the lives of baby at a day care center and a man at a wedding.
In the most recent incident on Monday, the organization’s national dispatch center received an emergency call just after 1 p.m. about a toddler in trouble in the Neveh Ya’acov neighborhood.
United Hatzalah volunteers who worked and lived in the area received the emergency call via their smartphone and two-way-radios and responded to the call, but it was Yossi Dvir who was first to arrive on the scene.
He succeeded in extricating the blockage from the child’s windpipe, believed to be a cookie.
When Dvir jumped up and rushed out of the post office, he momentarily startling the security guard and the other post office patrons.
He slammed his helmet on and roared off on his ambucycle and arrived in less than 60 seconds to the daycare center, where he found a neighbor attempting CPR on the oneyear-old.
Dvir, an experienced medic, took the blue little body and performed the Heimlich maneuver in a bid to remove the cookie by pressing under the sternum, followed by firm black slaps and compressions.
After several tense moments, he succeeded in dislodging the piece lodged in the baby’s throat. With a gasp, the child began to breathe again.
Dr. Yishai Ben Uri, another United Hatzalah volunteer, raced out of a nearby clinic to assist in saving baby’s life.
He examined the baby and told Dvir, “The baby is fine. You just saved his life.”
An ambulance arrived a few minutes later and transported the fully conscious child to the hospital for a checkup while Dvir returned to the post office (and waited another 25 minutes for his turn).
In a similar incident, a man who choked at a wedding hall in Acre was saved by United Hatzalah volunteer medical Mordechai Mammon, who lives in Ma’alot and was a guest at the wedding.
The man who choked, drummer Avraham Shitrit, had taken a break during the music to eat dinner and began choking on a piece of steak.
Mammon saw that Shitrit was in distress and rushed over to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him several times. He finally succeeded in clearing the blockage from his trachea shortly before the drummer lost consciousness.
The whole incident was captured by the security cameras of the wedding hall.
After the incident, Mammon said: “This is the realization of a dream. I became an emergency medical technician to help save lives after my sister was killed in a car accident. I joined up to do things just like this and on Monday I got that chance.”
In response, Shitrit said he “felt like I was going to die. Mordechai saved my life.”
This past week, the two met up once again with the Shitrit thanking Mammon for saving his life.
Anyone can perform the Heimlich maneuver, but one should be trained especially when doing it on an infant so as not to cause serious harm.
“This is how our network of volunteer emergency medical servicemen and women works,” explained Eli Beer, founder and president of United Hatzalah. “We get the emergency call; we alert the responders who are going about their daily lives – just like Yossi was – and they grab their equipment and go save a life or treat an injured or sick person in need of help,” he said.