Paramedic Pete Amato, right, and his brother Greg Amato, left, wheel Melanie Chirichella into Stony Brook University Hospital in Stony Brook, N.Y., on Saturday. Pete Amato navigated through whiteout conditions during Saturday's blizzard to take her nearly 20 miles to the hospital to receive a kidney transplant.

STONY BROOK, N.Y. — Melanie Chirichella had been waiting a year and a half for a kidney transplant when she finally got the call from her doctors Saturday that they had found a perfect match in South Carolina.

“It was like a miracle,” the 64-year-old told The Associated Press. “When she called and said, ‘We have a kidney for you,’ I almost fell off the bed.”

But there was a problem: A blizzard was raging up and down the East Coast.

In the end, Chirichella got her new kidney, but it required a combination of daring and improvisation, maybe even a little recklessness.

At first, emergency crews told her there would be no way an ambulance could navigate through whiteout conditions to bring Chirichella the nearly 20 miles from her home in Bohemia, N.Y., to Stony Brook University Hospital on Long Island.

But paramedic Pete Amato was undeterred. A decade ago, his brother had received a lifesaving kidney transplant. He hopped behind the wheel of a hospital SUV, turned on the lights and sirens and hit the road.

The kidney, plus a second one bound for a different patient at New York City’s Presbyterian Hospital, had left Charleston, S.C., on a Delta flight Friday evening.

The kidneys arrived at the New York City offices of the donation coordinator, LiveOn NY, at 9 p.m. Friday, just around the time the snow began to fall in New York. Then they had to undergo a battery of tests. Final results weren’t available until 9 a.m. Saturday, when the wind was howling and the snow coming down hard. Driving was already treacherous.

Wilson Li, an organ preservationist at LiveOn, was given the job of delivering both kidneys.

First stop was Presbyterian Hospital. The SUV carrying the team got stuck and had to be pushed by a city sanitation vehicle, Li said.

After the delivery, they ditched the SUV and waited 45 minutes for an ambulance for the 60-mile drive out to Long Island.

They stopped every 15 to 20 minutes to de-ice the windshield because the wipers couldn’t keep up. But they kept going, delivering the kidney to Stony Brook at 4:12 p.m.

Meanwhile, Amato was delivering his own precious cargo — the patient.

As he drove along the Long Island Expressway, his SUV was nearly hit by a tractor-trailer and he watched a Jeep spin out of control.

After undergoing the 3½-hour operation, Chirichella, whose original kidneys were damaged by diabetes, is recovering well, doctors said.