Residents fear the worst as Brooklyn ER crisis drags on
Josephine Musarella, owner of the Made 4 Me boutique in Cobble Hill, was eating dinner on Sunday, June 23, when she choked on a bite of food. “I was suffocating, I passed out,” she told the Brooklyn Eagle on Wednesday. “My eyes rolled back in my head, my hands were shaking and I slid down in my chair. My mother was terrified.”
An ambulance arrived within five minutes, she said. “Thank God I came out of it. But I couldn’t walk into the ambulance. When I slid down from the chair I put pressure on my foot. I must have broken my ankle.”
Instead of driving a couple of blocks to Long Island College Hospital (LICH), however, the EMTs drove Musarella to Methodist Hospital in Park Slope because of SUNY Downstate’s ban on ambulance runs to LICH.
“It took 20 minutes from Court and DeGraw to Methodist,” she said. “There’s so much traffic on 9th Street going to Methodist. And this was on a Sunday. If you have a heart attack you only have four minutes. Twenty minutes? You’re dead.”