PBA: And what about the job?
EC: After 10 months they accepted my condition and assigned me to a desk to answer phones. The city doctors said they couldn't keep me out sick forever, even though my personal doctor wrote them a letter saying I'm not capable of working. So they put me on restricted duty. I continued to be concerned about my health, I developed pneumonia and wasn't feeling well and I'm now considered chronically ill. They also decided to take my gun and shield.

PBA: Think they’re trying to push you out the door?
EC: Well, if they’re not trying to intimidate me, it’s something awfully like it. The job is going to make it hard for you in every situation. I always get angry after I see the city’s doctors and they make you feel insecure about your situation, don’t give you straight answers, don’t care about your condition, and make you feel like it’s you’re fault that you’re sick.

PBA: But by now hasn’t there been time for the Medical Board to meet with your doctors and decide about you getting out with your three-quarters?
EC: You would’ve thought so.

PBA: And how has this left you feeling today?
EC: I suppose I could be bitter about a lot of things, in and out of the Department, but I prefer to stay positive. Some of the people in my command have been fabulous, and none more than my partner Police Officer Herawattie Jeeuth. She’s been very supportive. And in a way I feel better about myself for having taken the extra mile when all the professionals and experts had told me it wasn’t necessary. Then there’s always the thought that I’m just one of many. I certainly don’t like having to fill myself with pills every day, but there was a time not too long ago when I didn’t even know that was the only hope I had. I’m not going to say I wake up with a spring in my step, but I don’t envy those cops who feel lonely and helpless and who don’t know where to go. That’s the main reason I’ve set up bluesarcoid@aol.com, what I hope will be an invitation for others who suspect they might have my problem to contact me. Like the doctors say, we can't cure it but we can treat it.

In the last issue of The PBA Magazine, we focused on the case of Police Officer Reggie Hilaire, one of the many New York City police officers suffering from unusual health problems because of their selfless work at Ground Zero in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In this issue, we explore the case of Police Officer Ernesto Cevallos, in the second of a series of question-and-answer reports on officers who gave their all and are now being short-changed — both financially and morally — by the NYPD and the city they helped to heal. We call them the forgotten victims.

hen Ernesto Cevallos graduated from the Police Academy in July 1996, he had more or less the same concept of the job as thousands of other graduates before and after him – an opportunity to be of public service while securing adequate pay and benefits for himself and any family that came along. After an initial training assignment in the Bronx at the 42 Pct., he was shifted over to the 41 Pct., where he spent most of his time in Tracer and Conditions units. He had his hairy moments, most conspicuously on one occasion when he was chasing after a thief who fortunately happened to fall on the gun he was trying to yank out of a waistband, but he never had to fire his weapon in the line of duty and racked up more than 400 arrests, earning Police Officer of the Month and other citations. But in September 2001, the 40-year-old Elmhurst native also drew security duty at Ground Zero, and that has left Cevallos with NYPD experiences that no Academy graduate wants to contemplate.

PBA: What exactly did you do down at Ground Zero?
EC: My first day down there was September 16, five days after the attack. It was a security assignment. I ended up doing 480 hours, broken down into 16- hour tours every other day. At the beginning, there was really chaos and confusion everywhere. The ashes were still coming down like snow. I was kind of surprised it was still like that so many days later.

PBA: What about protection?
EC: Simple common sense told you you should have had a mask. The first day, though, there was nothing, and no superior ever came along to say we needed to cover our faces. There was this place where they were keeping heavy respirator masks, which were limited and were only for the people working all the way down in the hole.

PBA: But didn’t you or any of the other security detail protest?
EC: A few of the guys were sarcastic about how the people working in the hole ranked and we didn’t. But I know that nobody ever directly protested. From the second day we had paper masks.

PBA: How many breaks did you have on these long tours?
EC: Every four hours we had a 15-minute coffee break, plus 90 minutes for meals.

PBA: When did you start having physical reactions to what was surrounding you?
EC: In terms of watery eyes and coughing, almost right away. Don’t forget that a lot of us were going all the way home with our uniforms covered in these ashes and dust. That first winter I also had the usual seasonal cold, but it didn’t go away like it usually did. In fact, none of the colds I had for years afterward just came and went. They all lingered for weeks and weeks.

PBA: What did your doctor say about it all?
EC: At the beginning, nothing. I went down to the Mount Sinai tests that were being offered, and they said my breathing wasn’t normal. They also said I had an enlarged liver. My own doctor, though, didn’t find anything. At first he was alarmed by what Mount Sinai had said about my enlarged liver, which was totally unexpected since I don’t drink. But he ran his own tests and said there was no trace of hepatitis or anything like that.

PBA: Then?
EC: For the most part, the next few years were just occasional coughing spells and those lingering colds. But then in March 2007 I suddenly got dizzy and my heart started beating rapidly. I checked myself into the hospital, and they wouldn’t let me go for a couple of days before they did all these tests. But they said they couldn’t find anything, either. In the meantime, they said, I should stay at home. It was almost like they were waiting for me to come up with more symptoms. I ended up out of work for a month.

PBA: Any lingering effects when you went back to work?
EC: Not at first. But in July of last year I woke up one morning with pains in every joint in my body. I tried telling myself it was the weather or something, even though the dry coughing came back, too. Then, while I was out driving on patrol, I suddenly couldn’t breathe. While unconscious I lost control of the wheel, and my partner had to grab it from me. We crashed into a car, but luckily nobody was hurt. This time they kept me in the hospital for four days. When they’d run all their tests, they said the only guess they could make was that I had suffered an attack caused by high blood pressure.

PBA: But you didn’t believe that.
EC: I really didn’t, not even when I went to my own doctor again and all he could say was that the joint pains were probably because of the air conditioning where I lived. I mean there were just too many things wrong for it all to be explained by something like air conditioning! So I insisted with the doctor, would he please send me for some x-rays that might find some common element in the pains, the dry coughs, the breathing, and all the rest of it. He sends me to a pulmonologist for a better checkup. The good news is that we’re not talking about the air conditioning anymore. The bad news is that the specialist says I might have cancer and I need a biopsy. They don’t find a tumor; what they find is sarcoidosis, an attack on the entire immune system that explains everything from the enlarged liver to the rapid heartbeat to the dry coughing and the scarring of my lungs.

PBA: What can be done against sarcoidosis?
EC: Nothing at all to cure it. It can be treated, but not cured. I’m on steroids and an inhaler for the rest of my life.

PBA: And you trace this disease to your time at Ground Zero?
EC: That’s when the symptoms started. And it can’t be just a coincidence that there are other cops who were down there who are also suffering from it or that nobody in my family has ever had anything like it.

PBA: What was the reaction in the NYPD when you told them what you had?
EC: At first the doctors tried to persuade me to go back to work. One of them admitted he didn’t even know what sarcoidosis was, and I thought that was a little scary. But he eventually underwrote my leave from duty for 10 months.

PBA: Time spent how?
EC: Well, one thing was trying to contact other cops exposed to various diseases because of their assignment to Ground Zero. I also went down to Washington to meet with congressmen and explain to them how frustrating it was not only to be ill, but also to have to start from scratch where sarcoidosis was concerned. On the one hand, I found it amazing that I had to be the one to tell so many intelligent people what the disease was. But on the other, I kept telling myself that if enough people finally knew what it was, maybe other victims wouldn’t feel as lonely as I did trying to cope with it.