NEWARK, NJ (AP) – When a traveler had an accident at Newark Liberty International Airport, the police received help from a famous doctor: Mehmet Oz.
The incident occurred on Monday night, when port authority officer Jeffrey Croissant saw the 60-year-old man fall to the ground near a baggage reclaim area.
Croissant asked for backup and began performing CPR immediately on the unidentified man, who was not breathing and appeared to have no pulse, according to the Port Authority.
When someone else came to help, Croissant did not immediately recognize that it was Oz, the cardiac surgeon and longtime host of the TV show “Dr. Oz Show ”, which happened to be nearby.
The two performed CPR on the man together until three other officers brought oxygen and a defibrillator to the man, who eventually recovered his pulse and was taken to a hospital for evaluation.
“What help is better than having a heart surgeon?” Croissant said later.
Oz told Good Morning America that his daughter warned him about the man and that when he turned to look, he saw the man lying on the floor with a pool of blood near his head.
The defibrillator “diagnosed that his heart had stopped, as I thought it was the case, when I couldn’t feel a pulse,” said Oz. “He told us to move away. And have you seen those films in which the patient is shocked and shakes off the floor? This is exactly what happened. Normally, the heart does not start again … in this case, as in the movies, his heart starts again ”.
Oz has helped injured people on several occasions.
In 2015, emergency responders who arrived at the scene of an accident on the New Jersey Turnpike found that Oz was already treating two injured people. And two years earlier, he helped a British tourist whose foot was severed when a taxi driver jumped the curb at Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan.