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by PATRICE O'SHAUGHNESSY and CARRIE MELAGO
Just hours after being released from a physical rehabilitation center, Firefighter Jeffery Cool was cheering on his fellow Bravest at a charity hockey game yesterday.
Cool, who suffered critical injuries when he plunged 50 feet from a burning Bronx building, was pushed in a wheelchair onto the ice at Nassau Coliseum before the city's Fire and Police departments faced off. Then, he stood up on his own as the national anthem was played.
"We're just so happy, but I do have a long road ahead," Cool said.
That morning, he had walked out of the Helen Hayes Hospital in West Haverstraw, Rockland County, leaning on a cane, as his family and colleagues from Rescue 3 applauded wildly.
The firefighter's emotional homecoming came a week earlier than expected. Cool began walking on his own for the first time last week, prompting physicians to push up his discharge date.
Eager to get home to his wife, Jill, and sons, Jeffery, 8, and Dylan, 5, Cool took his doctors up on the offer. And with bagpipers playing and his colleagues cheering, Cool climbed into an FDNY van headed for his home in Garnerville.
"I'm almost as happy today as I was the day I brought him home from the hospital 38 years ago," Cool's overjoyed mother, Vada Cool, said.
Cool's release came just three months after the Jan. 23 blaze that killed two city firefighters - Lt. Curtis Meyran and John Bellew - and seriously injured Cool and three others.
Cool spent three weeks in a coma, needed 46 pints of blood and underwent numerous surgeries after he lost hold of a rope leading down from the building's fourth-floor window.
The road to recovery has not been easy. Cool lost 35 pounds following the blaze and has endured four hours of grueling physical therapy every day since. He'll continue receiving therapy three days a week for the next year.
But yesterday, he simply enjoyed himself. He reacquainted himself with neighbors, relished the FDNY's 5-3 victory at the hockey game and savored life at home.
"I'm sleeping in tomorrow and just relaxing," he said. "It will be great to sleep in my bed tonight."
With Lisa Muñoz
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