Jeremy and Joshua Feintuch’s first call as EMTs with the Great Neck Vigilant fire company was a tough one – a women in cardiac arrest who did not survive, despite an emergency rescue attempt.
“That was a big wake up call, I guess – welcome to the firehouse,” Joshua Feintuch said.
Since that day the twin brothers, both Great Neck natives, have saved lives, conducted CPR training and won awards for their emergency response work.
It’s all part of their shared goal of becoming doctors.
Both Joshua and Jeremy are recent graduates of New York University, and are currently applying to medical schools.
“We always knew that we wanted to go into the health field. We knew we wanted to be physicians in the future,” Jeremy Feintuch said. “But we kind of didn’t know how to start volunteering, how to do anything medically now at our age.”
Joshua and Jeremy grew up in Great Neck, the children of a speech pathologist and a dentist. They attended North Shore Hebrew Academy High School and both decided to attend NYU.
In the summer of 2010, after their first year at college, the Feintuch twins took EMT training in California and soon after applied to join Vigilant’s all-volunteer EMT corps.
The brothers have been working shifts ever since, and have won two departmental awards for ambulance call of the year.
“One year was for a cardiac arrest and we actually brought the woman back,” Jeremy Feintuch said. On that call, the Feintuchs conducted CPR and shocked the stricken victim five times with a defibrillator before she was stabilized, he said.
On another award-winning response, the brothers incubated a patient suffering from acute chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, saving her life.
“That’s really when the work that you do really makes a difference, when you save a life,” Joshua Feintuch said.
Their work left an impression on Rabbi Esor Ben-Sorek, a Great Neck resident who was assisted by the brothers following a recent severe car accident with a UPS delivery truck.
“Jeremy and Joshua Feintuch took my vital signs, gave me comfort and reassurance,” Ben-Sorek wrote in a letter to the Great Neck News. “Great Neck can indeed be very proud of these fine young men and of Vigilant’s service to the community.”
The Feintuchs also won this year’s Basic Life Support Provider of the Year award from the Nassau Regional EMS Council for their work on a CPR training drive at the Great Neck public schools.
And for now, the twins are focused on impressing medical school admissions officers where, if their luck holds, they could once again end up in the same classrooms.
“We work well together,” Jeremy Feintuch said. “It’s a great thing to have someone at your side to work together with, especially at the firehouse.”
