Zivildienst 2008 in Numbers and Facts

You could have barely missed the fact that I’ve been a community servant now heading towards the mysterious thing called university. Before filing my Zivi (community service abbreviation) experience ad acta, I am providing a list of five several furious facts in a very FM4 copycat fashion. On today’s (my last day of service) agenda is: Reporting my Zivildienst experience.

• Estimated amount of kilometer in total: 65,610 km in 9 months. (See where Zivildienst 08 took me… Spaace, the final frontier…)
• Estimated amount of patients in total: 1,093.5
• Average patients: 4.5-5 a day.
• Average milage: 275 km a day.
• Longest distance gone: 221 km (one direction) - Krems to Bad Waltersdorf - 2 hours and 6 minutes.
• Shortest distance gone: 90 meters - Old People’s Home Hohensteinstraße to Hospital Krems. The latest racing records: 49.5 seconds with someone on the tray, 37.3 seconds with the wheel chair. These patients never see the ambulance from inside. Since we just race with them all the way over the parking lot. A dangerous place after all.
• Maximum stops for ingestion: 6 times in 8 hours (including several coffee slurps, #1 food for Zivis (Käse-) Leberkässemmeln , food provided by other Red Cross stations and “gifts” by a patient).
• Most frequently visited attacked supermarket: most definitely BILLA.
• Number of mobile phones ran over by me: 1 in 9 months, so what’s the deal.
• Least intensive medical attention provided: Help up an old lady and - once we are here - roll up the blinds. Plus putting the butter out of the fridge.
• Most irritating and funniest (in retrospect) patient experience: A tie between a demential 97-year-old patient “singing away” her problems with her tenants and family and an old lady claiming I should get my hair cut in a more decent way asap. Good thing she didn’t see our Emo Zivi whose hair looks even more interesting.
• Most disgusting patient experience: Maggots (=Maden) in a open sannious (=eitrig) wound on a foot accompanied with an even more disgusting olfactory disturbance. Diabetic and alcoholic are two adjectives that don’t go well together in one human system especially when the symptoms coincide on a foot.
• Most disgusting and funny (not just in retrospect - probably because I wasn’t affected directly) patient experience: We drove home an old demential 80-something year old lady that was notrious for puking when driving. Therefore the hospital’s nurses were nice enough and didn’t “feed” her any substance she could throw up. At least that’s what they reassured us. However, life writes funny stories. So here’s what happened. After 10 minutes the lady would constantly throw up. Not uncommon for her age, she had dentures who also ended up outside her body, just like the loads of whatever she had before this trip. So I stopped (I was the driver) to assist my fellow buddy in the patients department of the ambulance car. He took the dentures, put it into a kidney dish. While I was cleaning up he removed all the “contaminated” pile of kidney dishes, the patient kept vomiting and my fellow ambulance man suggested to put it all into a plastic bag, because you could tell somebody was messing up the car already. Your nose would tell you. Once she was feeling better, we continued heading home. After 5 minutes she would restart, but fortunately lacked of material to blow out. 15 minutes pass and all of a sudden my colleague asked furiously, “Where did we put the dentures. It’s no longer in the kidney dish I put it.” I didn’t know, I never saw them, so he was forced to comb through the “contaminated” vomit-filled plastic bag to search for the dentures. It took quite some time. I stopped to assist him. More to watch him dig through the dirt. Oh geez, it was hilarious. For me not just in retrospect, but my colleague needed some time to develop a sense of humor for this specific “event.” Once we arrived at home, we unloaded the patient and handed them the dentures in a kidney dish. “Oh, that stinks, I better through it away. What is this anyway?” a relative said and we were like: “These are the dentures, you don’t wanna throw that away!”
• Most moving patient experience: Bringing home a patient diagnosed with terminal cancer. He had less than a month to go and would now spend his last days at home. That really was touching.
• Most seriously hurt patient: A traffic accident. A motorcycle (a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old) crashed into a car (40 something obnoxious and pretentious guy). I was the first unit arriving. I assisted the physician. I was pretty shocked, but “drugged” with adrenaline. After I week I (not physically) ran into the teenager I was taking care of. He couldn’t remember any of it due to concussion, but was relatively fine again. That was a rewarding moment too when he thanked me.
• Most pregnant patient: 9 months pregnant. Water broke. (Throughout the entire trip I couldn’t get rid off the idea that I knew that lady and her husband - who was going in front of us - until I realized that her husband helped to prevent our car from going up in flames back in August. He’s a mechanic and our car was smoking like crazy, he disconnected the battery from the rest of the system. The lady was 8 months pregnant came running out of her house with her husband because she saw the smoke. It really bothered me that I realized that only on our trip home from the hospital… Maybe I was just too nervous with a pregnant lady in my back.
• Number of cigarettes I would have smoked during shifts, if I was a smoker in total: 936-1,404 (if you work 26 times a month and smoke 4-6 cigarettes [that's a very optimistic number by the way] in 8 hours of service).
• Maximum number of wild boars and sows encountered in early morning dialysis taxiing on the way to Stixendorf: 6.
• Number of fellow ambulance men I locked up in the car and didn’t realize for at least 15 minutes: 1 in 9 months. So again, what’s the big deal. I am very sorry, Susi. (Susi’s the name of the ambulance man, just to clarify).
• Most popular patient I taxied: A terrorist. If “popular” were a synonym for “most-wanted by police force in Austria”. Among Juistizwächter (Austrian jail guards) he’s a real celebrity. No further information will be provided due to security and life prolonging measures taking for my benefit.
• Lessons learnt in 9 months: ∞. I know this final statement doesn’t correlate with my bitching, ranting and venting about some fundamental issues in the community service system, but I mean it.

All Community Service related topics have been posted under the tag Zivi. Have fun browsing it.