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The Greene County incident happened Friday evening, May 17, in the Village of Catskill.
Emergency crews were called to a residence on Main Street for reports of a 63-year-old man who was unable to get up and was having difficulty breathing, Greene County newspaper Porcupine Soup reports.
Nest home video footage posted on YouTube shows a male and female EMT responding to the residence in an ambulance. The female EMT appears agitated right off the bat when she sees that the patient is on a second-floor landing and is struggling to get down.
“Come on down,” she yells to the patient, to which the man’s wife explains that he’s having difficulty doing so.
“I can’t carry him down the stairs, so he’s gonna have to go on his butt and come down step by step,” the female EMT tells them.
Moments later, both medics are seen assisting the man as he walks toward the ambulance. It’s quickly evident that he’s struggling to get up the step into the vehicle and the audio partially captures him complaining about “my knee.”
Nearly 40 seconds go by as the man struggles to pull himself into the ambulance and onto a stretcher. He eventually manages to get inside and collapses on the vehicle’s floor next to the stretcher.
At one point the female EMT, who is seated inside the ambulance, gestures to the male employee as if to suggest that he should just shove the patient in.
“You have to sit up. You can’t sit there,” the female EMT tells the man as he attempts to lift himself off the floor. He then falls onto the floor a second time.
“You need to get up!” the woman shouts at him. “I’m not doing this. I can’t get you up now… there’s no reason why you went down like that.”
As the patient continues struggling on the ambulance floor, the male EMT begins to berate him, alleging that he’s faking the ordeal.
“You gotta pull yourself up. You shouldn’t have come down like that,” he says. “I literally just watched you put yourself on the ground. Like, I’m not playing the game with you.”
As the man continues struggling on the floor, the female EMT is heard telling him to get out of the ambulance “and then try and get back in again.” The man is heard responding, “No, I can’t.”
When the female EMT suggests that her colleague pull the patient out, he tells the man, “You put yourself down there, you can get yourself back up.”
The man again tells them he can’t get up, at which point the male EMT threatens to call the police. He accuses the patient of abusing the 911 system and suggests that he could get arrested.
“I have no pity for this. This is a waste of my time right now,” the male medic is heard telling the patient’s wife. “I’m not here to deal with that.”
Moments later, the male EMT pulls the man’s legs, partially freeing him from the confined floor space. As he does so, the patient is heard yelling out in pain.
“You shouldn’t have put yourself down there,” the male medic tells him.
After several minutes, the patient eventually pulls himself up onto the stretcher with no help from either EMT.
“I’m sorry man, I’m not trying to laugh at you, but I feel like I’m dealing with a teenager right now. I feel like I’m dealing with my 7-year-old that won’t follow directions,” the male medic tells him. ““That’s really what I feel like. I’m not trying to be mean. It’s just that my 7-year-old listens better.”
As they check the man’s vitals, the female EMT turns to his wife and says, “Make sure you don’t call later because you don’t feel good because you want to go there to be with him.”
The male medic then tells the man that his blood oxygen level is at 99-percent.
“Better than mine. All that and it's 99-percent. Holy cow,” the female medic says. “That’s fantastic. I don’t know what you’re going to the hospital for.”
“Well at this point he’s going because he can’t get out of the (expletive) vehicle,” the male medic tells her.
The patient was taken to Columbia Memorial Hospital in Hudson, where doctors determined he was suffering from internal bleeding, was not getting enough blood to his brain, and would need an infusion, Porcupine Soup reports.
Andrea Corrie, a friend of the couple, told the outlet that both the patient and his wife have developmental disabilities and he has suffered multiple strokes.
“So, his left side is very weak, and he isn’t able to lift things or, as you can see from him struggling to get onto the bed then falling off, unable to support himself at all with his left arm or leg,” Corrie told the outlet. "His balance is also very bad because he has partial amputation to one foot.”
Footage of the incident was shared widely on social media, with many demanding that the employees be fired.
On Tuesday, May 21, Town of Catskill Supervisor Patrick McCulloch told Daily Voice that both EMTs involved in the incident had resigned.
"The Town’s investigation into the personnel part is over, but we are still looking at the entire situation to ensure this never happens again," McCulloch said.
He added that the town is considering additional training and body cameras for staff going forward.
Watch video of the incident below.
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