They know the Brabant roads like their own back pocket, paramedics David and Mike. The cheerful men are quite attuned to each other, tell each other the truth and laugh between rides. They know the stories behind the many front doors they pass. There is always that one story that you can’t easily let go of…
Ambulance nurse David has worked in the ambulance for two years, but has made his mark in the emergency room. His colleague, ambulance driver Mike, has been doing that job for eighteen years. Together they look back on the past year. There are weeks in which they experience what others do not experience in a lifetime. Events that can also be seen in the Broederschap series on Omroep Brabant.
Brotherhood: Stories that stay with you
David and Mike were featured this year in the well-watched series ‘Brotherhood’ on Brabant+. In this series we get a look behind the scenes of the work at the ambulance in Brabant. In this article, both gentlemen look back on a story from last year that has stayed with them.
Mike and David are well attuned to each other: “Sometimes one look is enough,” says David. “Although I am responsible for the medical part and Mike is responsible for medical support and logistics, we always listen to each other if one of us has a bad feeling about something. We both need to be able to sleep.”
The duo encounters the most intense events and stories on the street, “but you can’t take all those scenes home with you. You can’t keep that up.” There are exceptions, like Jack, whom they met last fall and who went right into David’s heart.
“At the end of the morning we received a report about a fall at a childcare center,” says the ambulance nurse. The 9-year-old boy had slipped on the grass during a game of football and was now unable to stand or sit. Strange, thought David, because a fall on the grass doesn’t just cause a broken bone. The child looked deathly pale and was in complete panic. “He shouted that I had to inject the pain away,” says David. “I noticed a mature statement for a nine-year-old child.” His language could also be called ‘mature’, David laughs while giving a wink.
“His mother saw in my eyes that she did not want to hear the answer to her question.”
The boy was taken into the ambulance and photos were taken in the hospital. The ambulance team’s work is then over, and normally they prepare for the next report, but David did not calm down. “It just didn’t make sense for a young boy to just break his leg.”
The relief came the next day: it was not bone cancer, as David had suspected, but a benign cyst that had weakened his bone, causing it to break ‘just like that’. He stopped by that day, although he rarely does. “Jack had touched something in me that kept that case stuck in my head,” he explains. He doesn’t know why the bright little man touched him so much. “Sometimes it just clicks.”
When he walked in, the kid immediately apologized for swearing. And as he left he asked for an autograph. “The first ever,” David laughs. “But after Brotherhood I was able to hand out more.”
“I wasn’t used to the cameras and even left the TV crew standing in the rain once.”
The series clearly shows that all stories are different, with good and less good endings. It is then that you see the brotherhood between the two, who now need just one look.
Showing the different sides of their work in Brotherhood, the beautiful and sometimes the less beautiful, is really important, they say. Perhaps it can even help to ‘educate’ people a little, for example so that they learn even better when they can or cannot call 112. “People know better what to expect from us and we are already noticing results in the car, that people are calmer.”
They had to get used to the cameras around them during filming days, Mike laughs. “During a rainy day of recording, I asked why the crew had been waiting in the rain for an hour. ‘Because we couldn’t get into the ambulance!’, they responded. I had locked the car, which is what I always do when we are working with a patient.”
If it is up to the gentlemen, there will be a second season. “We go through tough things, but stories like Jack’s make up for everything,” says David. “To this day, I still enjoy going to work, and the series has only made me more enthusiastic about it. I hope to inspire others; if you get the opportunity to do this special profession, you should take it!”
