Max Vener Professor Arceneaux English Composition I February 1, 2012

High in an Underground Bathroom: How Eight Hours Changed my Life

I find it amazing how much something as fundamental as a persons driving motivation in life can completely switch gears and head in an entirely new direction within only a few hours. In less than eight hours I discarded a dream I had had for as long as I could remember to make room for a new burning desire to help people. I grew up knowing exactly what I would do with my life. One of my earliest distinct memories is of me, at around four years old, passing various tools to my father who was, in turn, helping his own father install an air conditioning unit in a building. All I remember thinking was, This is so much fun, I want to be an engineer like Granddaddy when I grow up! I was raised in what can easily be described as a medically oriented household, with both of my parents as highly specialized and successful doctors. Dinner conversation would normally consist of my younger brothers and me drilling our parents for information about their days as though we were mining for gold. My brothers were always somewhat interested in studying medicine in one form or another. I, on the other hand, had never felt any such inclination and instead harbored a mild disgust for the subject outside of academic curiosity of the different procedures or methods. All the way up through high school and my first two years of university I held onto my childhood dream, knowing

that one day I would be an engineer. Though my future as an engineer was already on unstable ground at that point due to an unpleasant internship, the certainty that I would be an engineer was shattered and replaced the morning I stepped on an ambulance as a volunteer medic in Haifa. My first shift was not the most memorable or even the most exciting of my volunteer ride-outs with Magen David Adom, the national ambulance service in Israel, it will always be the most important of them. I had only just arrived in Haifa a couple days before, after completing a strenuous ten day course to be a qualified First Responder, when I had my first shift with MaDA. Despite my shift starting at seven in the morning I had my first call around ten oclock. Even though I hadTbeen told to relax because the station was nhrmally quiet and only ran a couple calls per shift, I found it very hard to calm my nerves with the dispatch telephone taunting me with its promise of excitement, so when the call finally did come I almost thought it was my mind playing tricks on me. ere is nothing quite like being thrown around like an out of control roller-coaster as you are trying to sit in the back of a speeding ambulance and all the while your mind acts like a crazed rabbit jumping between all of the different scenarios you could be walking into momentarily. After arriving and being told what bags to grab out of the back of the ambulance, I followed the two lead medics down the stairs into a subway station and into a bathroom to find a man apparently unconscious on floor. Because we responded to the call on a Lavan, a basic life support level ambulance, there was not much we could do while waiting for an advanced ambulance to arrive beyond propping him upright and measuring his vital signs: heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate, as well as his blood glucose level. After helping him onto a stretcher and into the back of the advanced ambulance I finally got the chance to ask my partners what was wrong with the patient. Up until that point the conversation and assessments were done in rapid Hebrew, a

language I still do not have a solid grasp of. I was told the man had overdosed on drugs. Though I was already feeling proud to have helped the man, the feeling of accomplishment for having helped him when he needed it most is what has kept me in the field of emergency medicine ever since. It is that pride and self-satisfaction that set my course and has kept me as focused on my current path as a predator on its prey even through the mundane medical transport calls and the seemingly unnecessary dispatches, because I am always helping someone in need, which is the very definition of emergency medicine. I intend to make an A in this class, -Max Vener