HEROES WORLD JUNE 2022

53 HEROESWORLD Text Hanno Meier Photos Daniel Knogler A FIRST RESPONDER ONTOUR Has the coronavirus changed the situation? “Not in terms of the calls we get,” Daniel explains, “except when it comes to masks.” South Africans, he says, are extremely disciplined in wearing them, even though the virus is absolutely everywhere. Be it on duty or in daily life, even the smallest store has an attendant at the door splashing sanitizer on the hands of everyone who seeks entrance. “If you don’t open your hands, you won’t get in,” the Austrian continues. “No noses are poking out of masks anywhere.” Cape Town’s emergency care practitioners (ECPs) face tough situations. Every day, they deal with gunshot wounds, stab wounds and severe traumas following fights or car crashes. “There was a thirteen-year-old with a gunshot wound to the head…”, Daniel recalls. “We were the first responders, so we were able to administer the general anesthesia. Three days later, the boy was dead. These things stay with you.” MASS-CASUALTY INCIDENT Of course, there are always bad apples, he says. This goes for his profession, too. Some emergency responders base their sense of importance on the number of intubations they perform. One of his colleagues on the streets of Cape Town genuinely impressed him with her exemplary empathy, however: the scene was a full frontal collision in Blouberg, around the corner from the worldclass surfing beach. An almost full coach had hit a car, 29 people injured, three dead. “Sometimes, being there for a patient on the worst day of their life and giving them back some sense of inner peace by providing good care is more important than simply ramming a tube down their throat,” she later explained to him. She also told him a story about Uber, the taxi app. In South Africa, the police virtually never stop cars to perform a breathalyzer test, and the locals are rather cavalier about driving drunk. This often leads to accidents with injuries that are barely imaginable from a European perspective. When Uber came to CapeTown, the number of accidents under the influence of alcohol notably fell. “That’s the good part,” Daniel says. The downside was competition with the established taxi drivers, some of whom are members of criminal organizations. “It’s not unusual for them to ambush and shoot Uber drivers.” Some townships have become completely off limits for Uber drivers. Incredible. “It’s usually already too late when we arrive to such a scene.” One time, when the emergency responders were called to an apartment whose owner had had a heart attack, their intubation and reanimation efforts fell flat. “After trying for fifteen minutes, we had to abort – with all the family watching,” Daniel remembers. Once the death certificate had been issued and the paramedics were packing up their equipment, the relatives broke into rhythmic chanting, clapping their hands. “To me, it was an unfamiliar way of coping with grief, completely different to our culture,” Daniel describes the scene. “But there was something captivatingly beautiful about it.”

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