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Shortly after midnight Saturday, Marcel Pointis took a turn for the worse. The 87-year-old has spent most of the last two years living at a rehabilitation center on Queens Boulevard in Woodside. In the past, when he needed to be hospitalized, he had been taken to St. John’s. The nurses there know him and his family. His doctors have residency at the hospital. St. John’s has become comfortable to him as he has had to fight bouts of pneumonia in the past.

But in the pre-dawn hours Saturday, as a fever developed and signs of pneumonia began to show, St. John’s, just a straight 1.7-mile shot down the road, was no longer an option; its emergency room doors were closed as the hospital begins the process of winding down. Instead, Marcel Pointis was transported to Mt. Sinai Hospital Queens in Astoria, 2.9 miles away.

His is just one example of the hundreds of people already affected by the closing of the emergency rooms at St. John’s and Mary Immaculate hospitals on Saturday. Though few would question a difference in care from one hospital to another, there has definitely been an increase in volume for the remaining borough hospitals, causing an increase in stress for patients in need of emergency care.

That concern was offset somewhat Tuesday when the State Department of Health announced that it has extended $18 million in grants to help local hospitals pick up the slack while also providing assistance to the employees at the two closing hospitals. The money includes $3.6 million to Health and Hospitals Corporation to expand inpatient capacity and emergency room services at Elmhurst and Queens Hospital Centers; $4.5 million to Medisys to expand inpatient capacity and emergency room services at its Jamaica and Flushing sites; $3.5 million to North Shore-LIJ to expand inpatient capacity and emergency room services at its Forest Hills and Franklin sites; $2.7 million to Wyckoff Medical Center to expand inpatient and emergency room services; and $650,000 to the Joseph P. Addabbo Family Health Centers to maintain primary and preventative services at the St. Dominic’s Health Care Center.

There was another $3 million set aside for job counseling, placement, and workforce retraining for employees being displaced as a result of the two hospital closings.

Caritas, which owns St. John’s and Mary Immaculate, filed for bankruptcy two weeks ago and is in the process of shutting down the two hospitals – a process expected to be complete by Feb. 28.

At Elmhurst Hospital, which has added staff in the wake of the closings, the last few days have run smoothly, according to spokeswoman Atiya Butler. “We have it controlled right now,” she said.

On the other side of the borough, the situation is playing out the same way with the closing of Mary Immaculate’s emergency room. At Jamaica Hospital, which averages between 275 and 300 emergency visits a day, the numbers have gone up. Since Saturday the number of visits has averaged closer to 350, with a spike Tuesday of 382, according to spokeswoman Natifia Gaines.

According to Ole Pedersen, vice president of Emergency Medicine & Public Affairs for Medisys, which runs both Jamaica Hospital and Flushing Hospital, the facility has added additional staff and will work to add additional treatment space and inpatient beds over the next days and weeks to better accommodate the needs of the community.

“We will be adding an additional 40 medical-surgical beds and four critical care beds as well as expansion of Emergency Department treatment space,” Pedersen said.

Meanwhile, at Mt. Sinai, which is not a Level-One trauma center, which gets most of the car accidents and violent wounds, the increase has been less than expected.

“We’ve seen a handful of cases,” said spokesman John Kump. “We’ve beefed up our staffing for both inpatient and emergency areas.”