Grateful Survivor Visits Her Rescuers at Firehouse : Accident: Nichole Leeann Miller, who severed her jugular vein, brings flowers and bread for the paramedics who rushed her to the hospital.

An 18-year-old woman who severed her jugular vein in a freak accident last month visited a county firehouse here Friday to thank the paramedics who helped save her life.

“I want to thank these guys for all they did for me,” said Nichole Leeann Miller, who brought a bright bouquet of flowers and a basket of bread to show her gratitude to the men who were summoned from their beds in the pre-dawn hours of Dec. 29.

Miller was greeted with hugs by paramedics Eric Leverenz and Skip Hawkins, who administered intravenous solutions and rushed her by ambulance to Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo.

On Friday, the paramedics and firefighters at the firehouse on Del Obispo Street gave Miller a tour of the facility, a hamburger lunch and a T-shirt signed by the paramedics who came to her rescue.

Leverenz, who had visited Miller in the hospital, said that “for most of the calls we go out on, the outcomes are not so good. When they come back to say ‘thank you’ it is very gratifying.”

Miller said that her neck, which shows a small scar after emergency surgery to close the blood vessel, still hurts. She said she has had “a few good cries” since she woke from surgery and realized how close she came to death.

The teen-ager, who lives in Wisconsin with her grandparents, had been staying with her father, Wayne, in Dana Point during the Christmas holiday. Family members said Nichole had been suffering from a chest cold and got up from the living room sofa, where she had been sleeping, about 5:30 a.m. to drink a glass of water.

But then she fainted, dropped the glass and fell on the shards, which sliced into her neck.

Wayne Miller’s fiancee, Suzie Breedlove, was praised last week by medical personnel for slowing Nichole’s profuse bleeding by applying pressure to the gaping wound with her hands and a towel, and for dialing 911.

But Breedlove, who accompanied Nichole to the firehouse Friday with Nichole’s father and grandmother, said the paramedics were a welcome sight that traumatic morning. Wayne Miller said when he heard the fire engine coming, he ran outside to flag it down.

“We did do our part, but without (the paramedics) I don’t know I would have lasted another minute,” said Breedlove, who is a laboratory technician at Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Laguna Hills.