Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
It’s a poisonous snake! Snap! You’re bitten!
Luckily, emergency medical technician Oded Wurman and his ambulance crew are there to remedy such snakebite emergencies.
The case of the serpent solicitor was easily the most unusual call that came Wurman’s way. The 20-year-old Stanford student and EMT spent a near-sleepless summer this year careening through Israel in the back of an ambulance.
And between the ubiquitous traffic accidents, heart attacks and the occasional gang shooting in an Arab village, Wurman’s ambulance was at the scene after a man realized — a bite too late — that the strange tapping coming from the vicinity of his welcome mat was a venomous snake thumping its head into the door.
“It was in the middle of a residential neighborhood; it wasn’t out in the boonies. It would be like the same thing happening here in Palo Alto,” said Wurman, a junior biology major, with a laugh.
A newspaper reported that the victim saved his life by using a sock as a tourniquet, but Wurman said, “That sock was so loose it fell off when we picked him up. Nice thought, but it was really pointless.”
In reality, Wurman, the driver and a paramedic coaxed the hysterical Petach Tikvah man and his equally hysterical girlfriend out of the house and into the ambulance, and then proceeded to roar off to the nearest hospital. The Israeli version of “The Crocodile Hunter” tracked down the fugitive snake to the man’s oven, where it was enjoying a nice warm nap.
Wurman is unsure what became of the snake. He knows the victim survived.
While most college students earn extra money foaming lattes or pretending to reshelve library books, Wurman’s beat with an ambulance company in the South Bay is slightly more stressful.
“It’s something you can do part-time. It’s a very flexible job, ideal for a college student,” he said matter-of-factly.
Volunteering for Israel’s Magen David Adom over the summer was a two-pronged move for Wurman. On the one hand, he was born in Haifa and is a dual citizen, so it was an opportunity for the fluent Hebrew speaker to visit his homeland and lend a hand.
But, more practically, it was a chance to become a better EMT by working in an environment eons more fast-paced and volatile than anything here. Oh, and Israeli paramedics carry guns, too.
“After the first day, I didn’t feel weird sitting next to someone with a loaded firearm,” he noted.
When the last of the Jerusalem buses struck by suicide bombers over the summer burst into flames, Wurman was 20 minutes away by madly speeding ambulance. In Israeli time, he might as well have been sunning himself in Cyprus.
“Twenty minutes after the explosion, every seriously or moderately wounded patient would be on his way to the hospital. They have so much practice that if you’re 20 minutes away, you’re just coming in for the cleanup,” he said.
Wurman peppers his speech with EMT jargon. To the ambulance crew, a bombing, shooting or even the yearly 57-car pileup on Interstate 5 is an “MCI” — a multiple casualty incident.
“If we had an MCI [in America], we’d still be treating people on the scene two to three hours after the incident. We have so little experience with it that the mentality here is that the MCI is this big thing that needs to be carefully organized, and only someone who’s really injured needs to be taken to the hospital, ” he said.
Not so in Israel, which has had all the practice it needs to handle an MCI in a manner of minutes.
During the several major terrorist incidents that rocked Israel over the summer, Wurman’s ambulance did not get the call. Either it was too far away or otherwise engaged (in one instance, Wurman’s crew saved a would-be suicide just as a bomb exploded nearby). For this he is both grateful and frustrated.
“It’s a mixed bag. Long ago, I reached the conclusion that I’m going to see pretty nasty stuff, suicide bombings aside. This is going to happen whether I’m working or not; people don’t stop dying because I’m not working. If it happens, I want to be there to help people,” he said.
“I’m glad I was spared, but there is a definite benefit of experience in being involved in one of those.”
Wurman got plenty of practice with near-death experiences, however, just from working in the vicinity of an Israeli ambulance driver, whom he calls “a special breed.”
Israeli ambulance drivers are entitled to be even more aggressive, maniacal and discourteous than the average Israeli driver.
“Being an ambulance driver is a whole another animal there. People don’t pull over to the right — they pull in front of you, cut their brakes and don’t move. You’d swear some people must be doing it on purpose,” said a laughing Wurman.
“Here in Santa Clara County, you’re not supposed to pass people on the right. You’re supposed to slam on your brakes and slam on the air horn until they go right. If I pass on the right and you suddenly decide to go right, that’s my fault. In Israel, you can’t play that game. You can be on the freeway at 3 in the morning with one car ahead of you and he won’t move for you. It’s not his problem. You know there’s a 90 percent chance he won’t move, so you go around him.”
As cathartic as it is to swerve around a slow, selfish driver, Wurman knows that behavior will, at best, get you fired here, or, at worst, result in an ambulance being sent out for you.
Between snakes, shootings and suicides, an outsider might perceive Wurman’s summer as being pretty bleak. But it definitely had its upside, he said.
“We had a childbirth in the ambulance, which is very rare here. I assisted and the driver delivered the child. We had gone all the way to the hospital and parked in front of the labor and delivery ward, but at that moment the baby started crowning and the team of nurses came in and did their thing, but it was all done in the ambulance,” he recalled.
“That was an awesome experience. It’s the one call I can think of where you’re going for a good thing. Every other case, even if it’s something minor, someone is in pain or their lives will dramatically change or they may even lose their lives. But this was an unexpected thing, someone gained a life. I was on the phone with my mom as soon as we got them into the hospital.”