By: JOSEPH KELLARD
Ken Garden, 78, was about to go to work two Saturdays ago when he was "talking as if I were drunk and saying stupid things," he recalled, describing the onset of his stroke. His wife, Dina, called their daughter to their home in Oceanside Cove on Daly Boulevard, and Soloman arrived in five minutes. She said she could clearly see her father had "symptoms that were not correct," after which she called 911 for an ambulance.
Soon afterward, two police officers arrived, followed by Dan Sabatino, an assistant chief and advanced EMT from the Oceanside Fire Department, in his fire department SUV, but a required ambulance did not follow him.
Solomon claims that 35 to 40 minutes passed, and still an ambulance failed to show up. "They kept telling us that there are no ambulances, that they're all in difference locations," Solomon recalled. "They're in Elmont, the Island Park one is somewhere else. There are no backups. Essentially these police officers just kept looking at one another, standing around, saying, 'They're coming.' But if I wasn't there, I don't know what would have happened. It was a scary situation. He could have died."
Sabatino, his truck supplied with medical equipment, checked Garden's vital signs, which were good, he said. But the ambulance, which in this instance was supposed to come from the OFD, never arrived.
When a Oceanside resident calls 911 for a medical emergency, the protocol is that Nassau County receives the call and dispatches one of its two ambulances in the Fourth Precinct's coverage area. If both are occupied, the call is diverted to the OFD, whose dispatcher typically puts the call out to all members of its rescue company on their fire department pagers. If after a certain time there is no response, or the ambulances are occupied, the OFD contacts its backup from a neighboring fire department for a mutual aid response.
Detective Sgt. Anthony Repalona told the Herald that NCPD's 911 dispatcher received a call at 7:38 a.m. on Aug. 21 to assist a patient - Garden - who was having trouble walking and "with a history of a cardiac condition." The dispatcher "immediately notified Fire Communications for an ambulance," which kicked the call out to the OFD, since "in this case our ambulances were likely tied up on other calls," Repalona explained. The two police officers arrived at Garden's home at about 7:42 a.m.
Solomon needed to take her father to St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, but discovered that in his condition, neither a county nor an OFD ambulance could bypass another hospital (such as South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside) to take him to a hospital further away.
Repalona said there are strict protocols based on liability issues regarding transporting a patient to a more distant hospital. "God forbid the man goes into cardiac arrest," he said. "The protocol's in place. It's not that we don't want to take people to certain hospitals, it's that we can't, for obvious reasons of being sued," he said.
Nevertheless, while Garden survived and was back home three days later, he and his family still expressed concern that an ambulance failed to arrive even after Solomon decided to take her father to St. Francis following a wait of about 40 minutes.
While Sabatino evaluated Garden, Solomon determined that her father was "coming out of whatever was happening to him ... God forbid he was going into cardiac arrest. He could have been dead. Every minute counts."
"I was taking care of him from minute one," Sabatino said. "But I'm a medic, I knew he wasn't having a heart attack, and told him that according to the severity of the call, sometimes it can take some time for an ambulance to arrive. But there was an ambulance en route from Baldwin."
The question remains, Why did an Oceanside ambulance, which is required to go to the scene of a medical emergency, fail to come to Garden's house instead of the backup from Baldwin, for which, a dispatcher at Baldwin told the Herald, the call came in at 8:11. While BFD was en route to the scene, Solomon took her father in her car.
Asked why an Oceanside ambulance failed to back him up, Sabatino said that there was no technician from the OFD available at the time of the call. "What happened that day with staffing problems is certainly not an everyday thing at all," Sabatino explained. "Unfortunately, this kind of thing sometimes happens. And I was there within minutes and fully equipped to give this man top-level care even if he were in cardiac arrest."
Meanwhile, Solomon said that one of the options she and her parents have looked into to prevent this kind of scenario from happening again is to have available the phone numbers of private ambulance companies. "We want to make sure that if my father, God forbid, starts getting these symptoms again," Solomon said, "we need to have the numbers of anyone who can help us entered into our speed dialing."
