LIFE & HEALTH
Tales, photos of heroism as EMS set to toast 25 years since FDNY merger
Want a roller-coaster career? Buckle up with EMS. From the start of a 12-hour shift to its end, a typical tour for the more than 4,000 city emergency medical technicians and paramedics is full of dizzying highs and stomach-churning lows as crews crisscross the city responding to emergencies.
There’s no guessing what a call will bring: a mom about to give birth, a heart attack patient, a microwave-throwing maniac.
With Emergency Medical Service marking the 25th anniversary this week of its historic merger with the Fire Department, the Daily News captured some of the stories from a few frontline warriors of what they face every day.
The child cardiac cases hit paramedic Liana Espinal the hardest. In her 13 years with EMS, Espinal (inset) had seen her share of tragedy, but nothing prepared her for the day when she was called to a Brooklyn home to revive a dying fourmonth-old baby.
“It was very intense, trying to stay calm and trying to get everyone around you to stay calm, while the child’s parents are screaming in your left ear and you’re trying to gather information and trying to keep everything going,” she said, describing the 2017 call.
The baby was unresponsive and quickly turning blue, but Espinal, 36, kept working on the tot until the child was breathing again.
“Seeing the baby go from blue to pink ... it’s surreal,” she said. “I remember not crying until it was done.”
At EMS, emergencies come in all shapes and sizes and at all times, the Crown Heights, Brooklyn, native said.
“I was just sitting in my ambulance one day and this guy knocks on my window,” she recalls. “That’s when he tells me that his brother is in the car and he’s stabbed. We jumped out and provided care.”
“There is no routine day,” she said. “The minute after you log on it’s nonstop.”
‘It was very intense, trying to stay calm . ... Seeing the baby going from blue to pink ... It’s surreal. I remember not crying until it was done.’
LIANA ESPINAL
There are a few perks to working in the South Bronx. For EMT Frank Vela, one is having lunch at an empanada shop known as Margarita’s. “We’re habitual clients there,” Vela, 50, said. “We are always going there for lunch to get our empanada fix on.”
About eight years ago, Vela and his partner were dispatched on a 911 call of an elderly man having a cardiac episode in a car.
When they got there, they saw a familiar face.
“It turned out to be the owner of the empanada shop,” he recalled. “He was in cardiac arrest and we got there just in time. We had to shock him once or twice, but he made it.”
Now each time they go to Margarita’s, the owner is there, welcoming them.
“To this day he knows us by name and treats us like family,” he said. “He was so happy and thankful, but we just tell him that this is our job. This is what we do.”
“Sometimes when we’re simply driving by he comes outside and waves at us, letting us know he’s alive,” Vela said.
Then there was a time when Vela and his partner had to deliver a baby in the back of a taxicab, he recalled.
A crowd was forming as Vela and his partner tried to get the taxi driver, a native of Africa with limited English, to help them with the delivery.
After a few grueling moments, the baby came out, crying and healthy.
“Everyone just went wild,” Vela, a 17-year veteran, said. “When we took the baby out of the cab and brought him to the ambulance, they made a line and started clapping for us. That was pretty cool.”
Vela and his partner got more cheers in May 2020 when their ambulance wound up in the middle of a Black Lives Matter march passing Third Ave. and E. 149th St.
“We were following the protesters from behind when this shirtless guy with a bullhorn, a sign and some really short shorts jumped on the hood and started climbing on top of the ambulance,” he remembered. “The people were egging him on and all the protesters were coming around the ambulance and for a moment we became part of the parade.
“Finally cops got him down, but it was pretty strange,” Vela laughed.
But for every high there’s a low, he said.
His darkest day on the job was March 16, 2017, when his longtime friend and co-worker EMT Yadira Arroyo was killed by career criminal Jose Gonzalez. Gonzalez’s criminal trial is still pending as lawyers continue to debate if the diagnosed schizophrenic is psychologically fit to stand trial.
Arroyo and Vela often partnered on overtime shifts together. The morning of her death, Arroyo texted Vela and asked him if he wanted to do an overtime shift.
“I said I couldn’t because I had something to do,” he remembered. “That night I got a phone call and was told to get to Jacobi Hospital. When I got there, I saw all the ambulances.”
Arroyo’s death haunts him still; he easily could’ve been working with her when Gonzalez stole her ambulance and mowed her down in Soundview, the Bronx.
“It beats me up sometimes,” he said. “It’s wrong and selfish for me to think this, but it’s an innate thought that comes to my mind... if she would have been with me this would never have happened. I would have jumped on this guy and beat the s--t out of him.”
‘Everyone just went wild. When we took the baby out of the cab and brought him to the ambulance, they made a line and started clapping for us. That was pretty cool.’ FRANK VELA