• Cardiovascular

    In the Loop: Special delivery — how one EMT helped transport his uncle’s new heart

a close-up of two men's hands clasped

Teddy Ross, an emergency medical technician, had just driven a heart by ambulance to Mayo Clinic when he realized that the heart was for his uncle, who was there awaiting a transplant.


What started out as just another "ordinary day" for Teddy Ross quickly turned into a day he and his family will never forget. It all started, Florida's First Coast News reports, when Teddy, an emergency medical technician, received a page instructing him to drive his ambulance to the airport for a pickup in Miami. "Four or five physicians climb off [the plane] and two of them were holding a cooler," Teddy tells the station of what he saw when he pulled up to the runway. "In my head I was like, 'Hmmm … a heart?'"

The physicians confirmed that suspicion as Teddy drove them and their precious cargo to Mayo Clinic's Florida campus as quickly (and safely) as he could. It wasn't until he pulled away and started his return trip to Century Ambulance Service in Jacksonville that the possibility of what he may have just done began to sink in. Teddy immediately called his mom to share the potential good news. "I couldn't believe what I just did," Teddy tells the station. "I just transported my uncle's heart."

Read the rest of the story.

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This story originally appeared on the In the Loop blog.

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