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.