NEWARK, NJ (AP) – When a traveler was hit at Newark Liberty International Airport, police enlisted the help of a celebrity doctor: Mehmet Oz.
The incident occurred late Monday night when Port Authority Jeffrey Croissant saw the 60-year-old man fall to the floor near a baggage claim area.
Croissant asked for backing, and according to the port authority, he immediately started CPR on the unknown man, who was not breathing and did not have a pulse.
When another person came to help, Croissant did not immediately admit that it was Oz, the heart surgeon and longtime host of TV’s “Dr. Oz Show,” who happened to be nearby.
The two performed CPR with the man until three other officers brought oxygen and a defibrillator for the man, who eventually received a pulse and was taken to a hospital for evaluation.
“What’s better than having a heart surgeon?” Croissant said afterward.
Oz told Good Morning America that his daughter had warned him about the man and that when he turned to look, he saw the man lying on the ground with a pool of blood next to his head.
The defibrillator “diagnosed that his heart stopped, as I thought was the case when I could not get a pulse,” Oz said. “It simply came to our notice then. And have you seen those movies where the patient is shocked and ripped off the ground? This is exactly what happened. The heart usually does not start again … in this case, as in the movies, his heart started. ‘
Oz came to the aid of injured several times.
In 2015, emergencies that arrived at the scene of an accident on the New Jersey Turnpike found Oz was already treating two injured. And two years earlier, he had helped a British tourist whose foot was cut off when a kabbalist jumped into the Rockefeller Center in downtown Manhattan.