“Call 911!” Dennis Wales remembers shouting to his daughter Shannon one day in July 2007 after he collapsed in his bed with a stabbing pain mounting in his chest.
It would be tragic EMT hero Yadira Arroyo who would rush to his Bronx home and saved his life.
And on Saturday, it was he who went to her side — for her wake and funeral.
“She basically saved my life,” Wales, 62, told The Post, as he joined hundreds of mourners at the Joseph A. Lucchese Funeral Home in University Heights.
“The rest is history. I’m still alive.”
Wales, a retired Con Ed worker, had just finished mowing the grass at his Van Nest, Bronx, home when he suffered a heart attack.
Shannon, now 31 but then a freshman in college, happened to look out the second-floor window after calling 911.
Arroyo and her ambulance were stopped at a red light in the street below.
“It was a miracle,” Wales remembered on Saturday.
“If she hadn’t been stopped at that red light, I’d be a dead man.”
The daughter ran downstairs and told Arroyo her father was having a heart attack.
“She yells, ‘My father! My father!’ ” Wales recalled.
Arroyo and her partner rushed upstairs, pulling the stricken Wales onto the floor.
Arroyo began giving chest compressions as her partner readied the defibrillator.
“I was in a lot of pain and sweating, just white,” Wales recalled.
“Yadi just keep talking to me. She said, ‘Stay with me. Stay with me. Don’t worry. Everything is going to be OK.’
“I remember I looked up at her. I’m telling her, ‘You’re so beautiful. You have beautiful eyes.’
“She was smiling at me. She was like that. That was just her nature.”
Wales was in the hospital for 12 days, during which time Arroyo came to check on him.
Several years later, Wales ran into her at a friend’s handball tournament.
“I said, ‘Remember me? You saved my life,’ ” he recalled.
He heard about her death on the news.
Her family heard his story and invited him to sit with them at the wake.
Her death has hit him hard.
“It really hit home,” he told The Post. “She saved so many people like me.
“And now she’ll never save anyone else. It makes me so mad.”
Ten years after Arroyo saved his life, he has seven grandchildren.
