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.
