A man from France dropped to the city pavement, one of more than 3,000 emergencies on this day alone. A young police officer rushed to help.
The man from out of town is fine, and then he isn’t. He falls to the Manhattan pavement as if struck by a phantom blow, eyes wide, mouth agape.
He crumples on a Saturday afternoon on the edge of Manhattan’s Flatiron district, just outside a Beaux Arts-style building that was once a hotel and is now a shelter for families in transition from homelessness. As his wife and two grown children rush in disbelief to his side, someone runs into the old hotel’s lobby to alert two police officers who had been responding to an unrelated, unfounded call.
So begins, in the parlance of New York’s emergency services, one of 3,506 “aided events” on this single day, in this vast city, on July 10, 2021. It is about 4:30.
The man in the balance is Axel Farhi, 63, an energy consultant from France. He and his wife, Betsy, had come to the States in late June to visit their daughter, Claire, and their son, Max, both of whom live in the city.
After browsing and eating the early afternoon away at Union Square, the couple was walking with their children and Max’s girlfriend toward a subway station, with plans for a homemade dinner at Max’s apartment in Queens, when bam.
Now Axel Farhi, dressed in a blue polo shirt and reddish shorts, is out on the gray pavement, staring up, unresponsive to the calling of his name. And now two police officers are hurrying toward him.
One, Eddie Griffin, is 26 and 6-foot-5, with light brown hair; he has five years on the force. The other, Lily Graham, is 24 and 5-foot-5, with blondish hair in a bun; she has three years in.
But Officer Graham also has more than a decade of experience with emergency calls. At 15, she joined a volunteer ambulance corps in Norwood, N.J., going on ride-alongs, lugging equipment; at 17, she was fully certified as an emergency medical technician.
With no-nonsense politeness, she nudges everyone out of the way so that she can assess the situation, her voice set at a calming modulation.
“OK,” she says. “OK. What’s his name?”
“Axel.”
“OK.”
Kneeling before the man, Officer Graham slips on blue protective gloves and presses fingers to his neck. He has a pulse, but he is unblinking.
“Axel,” Officer Graham says. “Axel.”
She cradles his head with her left hand and begins rubbing his sternum with her right. He briefly flinches to this stimulus of pain, which is good. But saliva is pooling in his mouth, which is bad.
Officer Graham and Officer Griffin turn Mr. Farhi onto his right side. Officer Graham continues to rub his sternum, but he does not flinch, and his pulse is a whisper.
It is a sudden, intimate moment among strangers. People have gathered to watch from a respectful distance, as distraught family members do what they can, calling 911 and telling the police that Mr. Farhi takes blood-pressure medication.
Watching is the fallen man’s wife, Betsy Farhi, 59, a specialist in archival materials whose 35th wedding anniversary is in December.
Their how-we-met story begins at a dinner party in Paris, after which everyone went for a drink at a bar near the Sorbonne. During an awkward chat with two strangers, Betsy grabbed Axel’s arm and introduced him as her husband — which later prompted him to say: Now that I’m your husband, maybe we can go on a date.
Just two weeks ago, Betsy and Axel danced for hours at a wedding.
“Honey?” she calls out.
The officers lay Mr. Farhi on his back, and Officer Graham begins to administer chest compressions at a steady, rhythmic pace, to keep the heart pumping and the blood circulating to the brain. Keep the heart going, she is thinking. Full compression, decompression.…
The radio updates of a 911 dispatcher crackle. Sirens wail in the near distance. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up.
A Fire Department ambulance arrives, as does another police car. Who knows what the response time would have been had Mr. Farhi collapsed on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, or the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Queens, or in some congested intersection in the Brooklyn Flatlands? But fate has struck him here, in hospital-rich Manhattan.
The organic wonder of a team effort sets in, with officers and emergency medical technicians all playing their roles in the service of a life. But it is Officer Graham who takes the lead. She is in a zone, she has confidence in her abilities — and this is her guy. Axel is her guy, and there is no pulse.
Here she is striding to the back of the ambulance for a defibrillator, talking softly to herself, occasionally cursing. Here she is, returning for a suction device to clear the gathering saliva. Here she is, back a third time, for a self-inflating bag valve mask that she is soon squeezing to send oxygen into Mr. Farhi’s lungs.
Officer Graham is unaware that the man’s wife is keeping panic at bay by watching her assured competence. “I was just trying to fix on something, and I fixed on Lily,” Ms. Farhi later said. “Her determination was kind of keeping me going.”
The unconscious Mr. Farhi is lifted onto a gurney and — “One. Two. Three.” — into the back of the Fire Department ambulance. Officer Graham climbs in, helps to strap him in place and returns to providing him with oxygen.
Red lights are flashing. A medic is calling in vitals and other detail to NYU Langone Medical Center on First Avenue, a mile away. The back of the equipment-packed ambulance is tight.
“Holy crap, it’s hot,” Officer Graham says.
She asks for shears. She cuts away Mr. Farhi’s blue shirt to make sure that no trauma has been missed in the rush of the moment, and to save the doctors and nurses at the hospital a little time.
She also searches his pockets. She finds his blood-pressure medication. “Bingo,” she says.
The ambulance with Mr. Farhi races eastward, and so does a police car containing his loved ones. Its driver, Officer Griffin, is telling them that everything will be fine.
In fact, Mr. Farhi has suffered a massive heart attack caused by a blockage in his left anterior descending artery. In colloquial terms: a widowmaker.
East on 28th Street. Left on Third Avenue. Right on 30th Street. Left on First Avenue. To NYU Langone’s emergency department entrance.
Soon, Dr. Homam Ibrahim, a cardiologist, will clear the blood clots, put a stent in place — and advise the family that the wait begins to see if neurological damage has occurred.
Soon, the patient will end the wait by waking up and trying to yank out his breathing tube. A very positive neurological sign, it will be explained, and a testament to what Dr. Ibrahim will call the “excellent quality” of care given by Officer Graham, who in turn will deflect by citing the vital, fast-acting work of all the other first responders.
Soon, Axel Farhi — life saved and brain intact — will be released from the hospital to recuperate at a friend’s apartment in Jersey City with what his wife will describe as a beautiful view of Manhattan.
But, for now, there is this moment:
The opening of ambulance doors. An unconscious man whisked into uncertainty. And a young police officer knowing only that she had done her best for a stranger she first encountered about a half-hour ago.
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