When senior paramedic David Cohen evacuated a woman in labor from Beit Shemesh to the hospital this week, he had a hard time containing his excitement. But this time it was not a routine reaction to yet another baby being brought into the world with his help. This time, the birth he performed in the ambulance led to an extraordinary connection between joy and tragedy, between life and death. It healed the rift and closed the circle.
The story begins in late July 2013, and was first published this morning by Yaron Kellner in Yedioth Ahronoth': Shlomi Gelber (34), a resident of Beit Shemesh, was rushed to Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital suffering from a heart attack. In the area of Moshav Nes Harim in the Judean Mountains, his condition worsened, and an MDA team stopped on the side of the road and began performing CPR on him. However, when he arrived at the hospital, the doctors were forced to declare him dead.
A little over eight months have passed since then. A few days ago, when he was called to evacuate the pregnant woman, the place seemed familiar to Cohen. "A friend of the woman in labor came out of the apartment and told me that she was a widow whose husband had died a few months ago — and I immediately connected it to the person we had performed CPR on at the time," he said. "We put her in the ambulance, she was in labor, and I told her that if she needed to give birth, to say so, and I would deliver her.".
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Then it happened: Near the place where he performed CPR on Shlomi, he stopped the ambulance again — this time to deliver the deceased's widow, Shira Gelber. "I stopped, prepared the delivery kit, and within three minutes she gave birth," the paramedic recalls.
When he saw that everything had gone smoothly, Cohen decided it was time to share the story with Shira. I was the one who took care of your husband, he told her, and that was the moment when she lost her breath. "I was in shock," she said. "I hadn't cried until that moment, but then the flood of tears broke. It's exciting, it's a crazy closing of the circle. I never dreamed that I would have to call an ambulance and die in it with the same team. This was Shlomi's last journey, and in that place a new life was born.".
Shira added that she found out she was pregnant just two days after her husband's death, and the baby born this week is their fourth child. The encounter with Cohen, she decided, would not be the last: Before settling into her bed at Shaare Zedek Hospital, where she was taken after the birth, she invited him to the baby's circumcision, which is scheduled to take place today.
