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Saturday, September 22, 2012



Tell Them to Never Forget
As told by…
Gary Smiley, NYC Paramedic

Part Two

I thought about my son. I had lost my own father about a year and a half earlier, and I’m lying there trapped beneath this ambulance thinking, I’ve been doing all this crazy stuff for my job all these years and now…I got myself killed. My son’s father just himself killed. And apparently there are tapes of me screaming for help over the radio, but, thankfully, I don’t remember much of it. But I do remember that my thoughts shifted, and I remember thinking, Dad, if you're out there, you've got to get me out of here. And that was the last thought I can remember before they pulled me out. I asked my father, “Dad, if you’re out there, please get me out of here. I don’t want to die.” And I guess my dad had something to do with it, because I was in the kill zone, I was sixty feet from the base of the north tower. And you know most of the people around me were killed.

They pulled me out from beneath the ambulance and took me to a triage area for treatment, but I remember saying, “I’m not going to stay here, this is insane. I’ve gotta go back to work.” And they were like, “Don’t you realize you were just crushed underneath a truck?” And it was at that point that the second tower fell. And people were running around saying the craziest things. Like I remember the emergency services cops were saying that we were under attack, and they had bombed the white house and the empire state building, and that they were shooting rockets at us. I remember one cop saying they were shooting rockets at us from the Woolworth building which is over like twenty blocks away, and I mean you were like, what the…it was just total insanity.

I was so hyped up on adrenaline at the time that I didn’t realize the extent of my own injuries. I had inhaled large quantities of cement and gypsum, and I had suffered crush injuries, and it wasn’t until I started turning blue and was told that I looked like he was going to die that I realized the seriousness of my injures. I gave in and agreed to be transported to Long Island College Hospital. And one of the ER nurses saw me come in on the stretcher and broke down hysterical because she thought she was seeing a ghost. She had already been notified that I had been killed.

Within a day or two my kidneys began to fail. Shortly after that my overall health began to deteriorate. I developed severe sinus problems, and lesions formed on both of my kidneys and my spleen. And but for an excellent hospital staff and a wonderful man named Dr. Stephen Levin, I might not be here today. Dr. Levin, Occupational Health Specialist at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, took me on as a patient and saved my life. He really took care of me. Oddly, despite all the junk I inhaled, my lungs were never affected. Dr. Levin believes that genetics played a part. He told me, “Genetics said your lungs are not going to be bothered, Gary, but other parts of you will be.”

And he was right. I suffered with severe sinus problems. I was living on antibiotics, and I was constantly sick. Going to sleep at night was always a challenge. I couldn’t breathe, and I would freak out, and I couldn’t sleep. I used to have terrible nightmares. I would wake up screaming. But Dr. Levin made sure I got proper care. He started me on anxiety medications, and in 2009 I had a five-hour sinus surgery at Mt. Sinai. The left sinus had completely solidified. The doctors rebuilt my sinus cavity, rebuilt my septum, they took out some turbinate, basically they fixed me and I have been sick only a few times since.

I still suffer from insomnia. I just don’t sleep well anymore. It’s just something that I’ve learned to live with. And about once a year I have a very petrifying day where I go to the hospital and get my kidneys scanned. I inhaled buildings, and people, and everything else I should have never inhaled, and now I’m paying the price. I also have blood sugar issues, and problems with my pancreas and liver, and my memory is no longer sharp, but overall I’ve been maintaining okay. My life has normalized to some degree. I keep on track, I watch what I eat.

I remember my son saying to me when this all started, “Daddy, I’ll just give you one of my kidneys.” I guess I must have done something right. There were times in the first few years when I just wanted it to end, it was just too painful. The only thing that kept me going was my kids.

You know, as I look back, there’s no explanation. For whatever reason I’m still here. My partner, Danny, and I survived, but a lot of the guys who stayed in the AMEX Building with Danny were killed when the second tower fell. And you know, to this day I believe that if I had stayed there I would probably have been killed too. I used to go through a lot of problems saying, “I got these guys killed.” I mean after all, I was the one who suggested we set up there. But they kept telling me, “You didn’t kill them, Gary. They were there too.” I guess everybody made tough choices that day.

So, I eventually lost 27 people that I knew very well. About four or five that were very dear friends of mine, and that still haunts me today. But a good thing happened in 2007. I was picked in the lottery to be one of the readers at the 9/11 Memorial. I got to read the names of the firefighters, EMT’s and paramedics we lost that day. And I got to read my friend’s name—Jimmy Coyle. And that was a real honor. It was a big closer for me. I got to say goodbye to my friend.