GRATEFUL NOT DEAD

Thanking FDNY for 2nd chance at life

need of their help after spending 27 years working for the department, he said.

“I’m surprised I haven’t started crying. I’m a lucky man,” Coffin said. “They took very good care of me. I just don’t even know how to say thank you.”

“I told them, they know where I live — my house is in Bay Ridge — please stop in anytime you want,” he said. “I just feel very humble that I am here.”

Coffin remembers coming home from a run with Ladder Company 149 in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, on Jan. 9, 2016.

He told his wife he was having chest pains but wanted to take a shower before going to the hospital. His wife found him collapsed in a chair with his mouth hanging open.

She called 911 right away. First responders performed CPR and shocked him with a defibrillator. They soon found a blockage in his coronary arteries that was removed at Lutheran Medical Center.

The smallest survivor was 2-year-old August Chazen, who was hospitalized after she choked on a cracker last year on St. Patrick’s Day.

August was playing at a park with his nanny when he turned blue and went into cardiac arrest.

First responders performed the Heimlich maneuver and unblocked his airway.

Dancer Ashley Newman, 32, who passed out in a lower Manhattan studio after practicing a routine for the Chase Brock Experience, gratefully embraced her saviors, paramedics Mingze Wu and Juan Cortes.

“I wish there was another word other than thank you,” she told them. “I’m so grateful to meet you and make that connection.”

FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro commended his rank-andfile first responders for saving so many lives.

“No two calls are ever the same,” he said. “Each person is special. In each case, they were brought back and given a second chance.”