Helicopter Adventure

The kids often comment about the hospital as we drive past each day. Whether it’s Jayla reminiscing about the time she stuck a bead up her nose or, on the rare occasion we glimpse the helicopter landing, we speculate as to how the passengers enter the hospital from the roof.

“Maybe they have a secret tunnel they go down,” I suggested last Wednesday.

“Or maybe they have a slide,” commented a little voice from the back.

Little did I know that I was to experience it first-hand later that day – but not as a patient, thankfully.

You see I was scheduled to interview paramedic Sam Johanson that morning for my Day in the Life of series.

His job was more complicated than I anticipated and, within an hour, I had filled my notebook with screeds of shorthand.

Finally I asked him to describe the sights, sounds and emotions of conducting a rescue from the chopper and he said he could do one better. As they record everything from cameras fitted to their helmets, he could show me video footage of a rescue. We were about to watch this when his phone rang. Hanging up, he asked if I wanted to come to the Bay of Islands.

Any plans I might have had for the afternoon went flying out the window as I boarded the chopper and donned the headgear. I’d been in a helicopter once before for work but it was not as exciting as this. 

Within minutes we were flying over the sparkling Bay of Islands trying to locate an ambulance below at the house of a man having heart problems.

We’d been told it was in a remote settlement, the name of which I’d never heard. Expecting a few rundown shabby houses, I was surprised to find it was quite the opposite. Sam spotted the ambulance and we landed in a reserve surrounded by luxury retirement pads.

“Looks like we might have to hitch a ride back to the ambulance,” Sam said, what I thought was jokingly, as he pulled on his heavy back pack of medical paraphernalia.

We stood on the side of the road for a while in the sweltering sun before we heard the rumbling of a motor.

“Here we go, this’ll be the ambulance.”

But, amusingly, instead a steam roller rounded the bend followed shortly after by a marked 4WD with two young guys wearing high-vis vests, who I assumed were volunteer ambulance crew.

Sam hailed them, ran up and briefed them, before beckoning me to jump in. The two men introduced themselves as they hurriedly cleared the backseat, then did a U-turn and drove like the clappers.

It wasn’t until later when I asked Sam their titles that he confirmed, they were indeed randoms with whom we had hitch-hiked a ride.

We found the entrance to the steep, windy, metal driveway and met the ambulance near the top. We jumped aboard while the helpful strangers were left to reverse back down.

Inside was a man in his early sixties who, as well as being in pain, looked like he wanted to be anywhere else but in the back of an ambulance.

His wife confirmed that, once we’d driven back down to the helicopter, and the team were checking him out. Sensing he wouldn’t want a pesky journalist hovering around, and spying the needles, I slipped out the front door and tried to distract his upset wife by pin-pointing our whereabouts.

She informed me we were in Parekura Bay and said she had called the ambulance unbeknown to her husband as, like many men, he never would’ve had a bar of it.

The neighbour filled me in on some local information about the place and said the last time a helicopter had landed around those parts was to deliver a spa pool to one of the abodes.

It was hot. Sweat beaded our foreheads. The patient was transferred and it was time to board again.

We rose back into the air leaving the neighbour and a mother with a car full of kids who’d pulled over to watch, gazing up after us. The man’s wife was to make the hour and a quarter journey to Whangarei by car.

We landed on the helipad and the gurney, with the patient was wheeled through a shelter – no tunnels or slides – and into the lift which took us to the emergency department. Sam handed the patient over to a team of doctors and nurses, before doing the relevant paperwork and popping his head round the curtain to bid goodbye to the patient. I wanted to say goodbye too and thank him for letting the pesky journalist tag along throughout his ordeal but decided he’d probably seen enough of me.

Sam had told me that the paramedics sometimes do follow-ups with their patients and I found myself wondering, after, how the man was doing and if his poor wife made it to Whangarei alright.

Later that night as we sat around the dinner table and talked about our days I held the children enthrall as I regaled them with my adventurous high-flying tales. Strangely, nobody wanted to talk about their own day after that – I guess it just didn't compare.