The epic blizzard kept city medics so busy that — for the first time ever — they were given a time limit for performing CPR on patients, The Post has learned.
EMS workers normally call a doctor for advice after working on a patient for 20 minutes.
The doctor normally allows them to keep trying to revive the person, sometimes letting them continue for more than an hour.
But faced with an enormous backlog of 1,300 calls, the medics were told to quit after 20 minutes and move on to the next case.
CPR can last a long time and sometimes medics can work on patients for as long as an hour.
If the certified first responders, in this case firefighters, are on the scene and they are doing CPR for 20 minutes or more, they can call Telelmetry (FDNY doctors) who review the information at hand and decide if they can terminate that call and stop treatment.
Also yesterday, there were five-hour delays in responding to some 911 medical calls and even three-hour delays in responding to “priority” calls, which range from cardiac arrest to a report of an unconscious person.
The number of calls was so high in the city that units from New Jersey were called in to help.
Patrick Bahnken, head of the paramedics and EMT union, said he was told of one case in which police alerted the FDNY that an unconscious person had died after going 90 minutes without help.
At the height of the storm Sunday night, a 9 p.m. call went out from the home of a pregnant woman at 76th Street and 15th Avenue in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, but no ambulance was available, officials said.
Instead, firefighters arrived and delivered little Jasmine Tierney nearly five hours later, at 1:59 a.m., after giving her anemic mother three bottles of oxygen.
But the family’s ordeal was not over. Firefighters finally flagged down an ambulance four blocks away and had to carry the mom on a stretcher through unplowed streets.
Hours later, another expectant mom in Flatbush had to ride in the jumpseat of a fire engine because no ambulances were available.
But firefighters got her to a hospital, where she delivered a healthy baby.
Additional reporting by John Doyle
leonard.greene@ny
post.com