All works stops due to a mercy mission

An interesting but tragic job has kept me busy since late yesterday. My time has been spent with little sleep waiting for the phone to ring or another email to be received.

Other than a brief chat here and there with a couple of people on Facebook my time has been spent on this. I by comparison am a lucky man though and cannot dream of complaining.

The case involves a 30 year old contractor from another African country working overseas who has fallen ill and is now on a ventilator in intensive care.

Amongst other services one of my foreign clients also provide Emergency Repatriation services for insured claimants injured over seas. They have not had to repatriate to South Africa before and I am the only person they know here.

The patient is to be treated here in South Africa and is flying in on a fully equipped intensive care air ambulance. The last 24 hours have been spent liaising with immigration, the airport, the air ambulance company, the hospital, the land based ambulance company and a stack of individuals in five different countries.

We have another day or so to see the man stabilised and flown over.

There are something like 20 different people involved in getting this man to hospital. It is not an area of work I have ever been involved with before but I am most pleased to be working with a group of consummate professionals.

I hope the patient makes it. We are working damned hard to make sure he does.