|
|
June 10, 2011
Helping save lives with MDA
Paramedic talks about work and her own personal loss.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
“I’m very proud of my father. I’m very proud of my sister. And, although I was sent from Magen David Adom to speak about work at Magen David Adom, work as a paramedic in Israel, the story always makes me proud and I’m more than happy to tell it.”
The local Canadian Magen David Adom chapter hosted Israeli MDA paramedic Shira Applebaum Maresky, 26, in Vancouver last week. While here to talk about volunteer opportunities with MDA in Israel, she shared with various groups the story of her father, Rabbi Dr. David Applebaum z”l, and sister, Nava Applebaum z”l, who was a renowned medical researcher. The pair were among the seven killed and more than 50 wounded in the 2003 terrorist bombing of Café Hillel in Jerusalem, where Maresky still lives.
Maresky has been with MDA for almost five years. She has a bachelor’s in emergency medicine and a master’s in mass-casualty and disaster management from Ben Gurion University (BGU). Among other professional achievements, she is a member of MDA Israel’s national disaster-response team and is an MDA training instructor. This is her first speaking tour, and it has taken her from home to Toronto and Vancouver, after which she headed to Winnipeg and then Cleveland before returning to Jerusalem.
“A lot of people ask how I cope, how my mother is,” said Maresky about the questions she is most commonly asked. Her response: “My mom is, thank G-d, OK. She’s a very strong person. She’s very busy with the grandchildren and she’s busy all the time, finding different ways to commemorate my father and my sister.... How do you cope? You just continue life as it is. It’s always there, it’s always in your head, you think about it a lot,” she said of the tragedy. “Every time I go into Shaare Zedek Hospital and I bring a patient, there’s a humungous picture of my father right at the entrance, and it doesn’t hurt. I feel proud. It’s an honor.”
She spoke of her father, how well liked he was by everyone, “no matter if they were ultra-Orthodox, secular, Arab, Druze, Christian, he had so many friends, and everyone thought, really believed, that they were his best friend. He left stories. When I go to a patient and the patient tells me, ‘Wait, you’re Applebaum, right? You know, your father once treated me and I remember he said this and this to me.’ He was always a person. He was always a friend. He was always nice to the patient and sometimes that’s all you need, like the patient right now really doesn’t need treatment but he called because he needed a pat on the shoulder or whatever, and my father was just like them, he was a human before anything.”
She said she tries to take this attitude into the field. “I always try to have a smile on my face, to hold the old man’s hand on the way to the hospital, [for example].... It helps the family cope, it helps the patient calm down.”
And her caring doesn’t stop there. She will follow up with some patients. “Patients that I take to the hospital and they’re OK when they get there, if I see them again, I see them again, but if there are patients that were really critically injured or had a really life-threatening situation and I don’t know what their outcome was when I got to the hospital, I take the little sticker from the hospital with their [the patients’] information and then I’ll check up on them a few days later.”
David and Nava Applebaum are survived by Debra, Maresky’s mother, and her four other siblings: Natan, 32, Yitzhak, 30, Shayna, 22, and Tovi Belle, 20. The older three siblings are married and there are a David and two Navas among Debra’s seven (and one more on the way) grandchildren. While her mother is a volunteer guide at the Israel Museum, Maresky said all of her siblings are involved in the medical field in some way, Natan on the business side.
“Growing up with a doctor in the house, it becomes a part of reality,” said Maresky, who is also married. “I was a hundred percent sure I was going to be a doctor when I grew up. It’s not easy to become a doctor in Israel and I’m a little hyperactive ... I can’t sit for so long for seven years and study and get really, really high grades and so I said, ‘OK, it’s not going to happen.’” But then someone brought BGU’s bachelor’s in paramedics to her attention and she said, “I signed up that day. I can’t think of doing anything else.”
The most satisfying part of her job, she said, is “all the miracles.” She explained, “The people that you take to the hospital and you’re not sure what the outcome is, and then, a week later, you check up on them and they’re OK, they’re functioning and walking and breathing and talking.”
Maresky also spoke about the Yochai Porat Magen David Adom Overseas Program, which was founded in the 1990s by Canadian emergency medical technicians, according to its Facebook page. It is an intense 10-day course, after which participants, if they pass, can do volunteer work on ambulances. (For more information, readers can visit mdavolunteers.com.)
Closer to home, Canadians can, of course, help MDA by donating. Locally, the all-volunteer chapter that brought Maresky to Vancouver has raised enough money from broadly based donations throughout the Greater Vancouver community to donate an ambulance and currently is working towards fundraising for a second. According to the promotional materials that accompanied Maresky’s visit, the Greater Vancouver community ambulance has responded to 685 medical emergencies since it began service on May 16, 2010.
Several other ambulances have been donated by local individuals or families, Roy Grinshpan of the Vancouver chapter told the Independent. And, just recently, he added, Vancouver became “a member of the ‘MDA stork club,’” meaning that a baby was delivered by paramedics in an ambulance that was funded by a North Shore donor.
Another member of the local CMDA chapter, Dan Levinson, accompanied Maresky to her Vancouver engagements. An Israeli, he has a risk-management consulting company in Calgary and travels extensively. He has been in Canada for four years, he said. In discussing how Canadians and Israelis, in general, respond to crises, he noted, “This is such a big irony. The most popular character on TV and in movies is a police officer ... that detective, then sometimes the soldier and then the doctor. There’s all the ER [emergency room] shows ... all the CSIs. So, everyone loves to watch it, but no one really has a friend in the police, no one ever really thinks about going and becoming a police officer, except that very small segment of society who is a police officer. Why am I saying all of this? Because, in Israel, my very good friend died in the military; it’s not my family, like Shira, it’s her father and sister, it’s a lot closer than a good friend, but still, we start everything from the same baseline, we can talk about these things.
“Although she deals with it on a daily basis,” he said, referring to Maresky, “it’s still different when you talk about it with your friends, the whole atmosphere and the environment, in [Israel] than in a country like this [Canada], where no one wants to hear about it.”
When asked how they can live with such a heightened awareness all the time, Maresky said, “Ein makom k’mo eretz Yisrael.”
“There is no place like the land of Israel,” agreed Levinson. “That’s a huge philosophical question: What is the natural baseline of state of being? Living in Canada one’s whole life, one might assume that the tranquil state of being is the baseline, but then, when they go to Israel, all of a sudden, they say, ‘Yeah, there is friction, but I feel more alive.’ So, maybe it’s a matter of personal preference. Maybe it is a matter of how you were conditioned. But, at the end of the day ... why all the start-ups in Israel? Why ‘start-up nation’? Because that’s the way the world is, from a little bit of chaos, a lot of good things come out.
“I was just listening to your questions and I’m thinking, for someone who’s lived here, it’s very natural to say, ‘How can you live with that heightened state of edginess?’ But, for someone who lives there, he would ask you, ‘How can you live with all this numbness?’ And then, the question is, How is a human being supposed to live, what is the more natural? Maybe there is no natural state of being.”
^TOP
|
|
