Meeting Police Officer Robert Oswain on the street would give you little visible evidence of the illnesses that have been pillaging his body since he answered the call in lower Manhattan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A 42-year-old with a clear-eyed stare, he comes closest to revealing his real condition, when he stands up from a couch, for instance, and takes first steps — a summons to the neuropathy that has left his hands and feet tingling for long stretches at a time. Or, if you miss that initial hesitation before he feels confident enough to move, there are always the 20-odd vials of pills cluttering up the living room table of his home on the Bronx River Road straddling Bronxville and Yonkers. If he exhibits an almost jocular relationship with the capsules of varying colors, strengths, and side effects, it is because he has been left with little choice between that or what he describes as “sitting around all day feeling sorry for myself.” To say the least, none of this is what the Mount Vernon native had in mind when he joined the NYPD at the relatively late age of 32.

PBA: How come you waited so long?

RO: It just wasn’t in the front of my mind. I got a BA at SUNY Albany and was really thinking of becoming a lawyer. Too bad my grades weren’t thinking along with me. Instead, I sold insurance for a while, then worked here and there. I could have gotten into a family business, a hardware store in Croton, and it was pretty clear that if I did, the store would be mine one day. But I just couldn’t see myself doing the same thing every day. That just wasn’t me. So my father, who was a corrections officer in Westchester, talked me into taking the exam. It took a couple of years, but I ended up entering the Academy, then graduating in October 2000.

PBA: Your first assignment?

RO: My first and only one — the 47 Pct. in the Bronx.

PBA: Was that better or worse than your expectations?

RO: You never quite forget your firsts. You can’t really prepare for that, no matter how good your instructors are. Your first pursuit, your first DOA, your first anything. Even if you’re not really as much of a hard case as you’d like to think, whatever happens afterward never has exactly that same sting. Another thing I’ll never forget about going to the 47 was when one of the bosses warned us on the very first day: “This isn’t an easy place to work. At some point, you’ll be fighting on the street.” A couple of the new people with me, they were hit hard by that warning.

PBA: When did more serious problems pop up?

RO: The first one was a serious gum inflammation in 2002. The dentist had no real explanation for it. Then over the next couple of years, the ante started being raised. First there were these mysterious rashes on my back. After that came acid reflux, and then it was my sinuses. By 2007, I had incredible stomach pains. A gastroenterologist told me I had an inflamed liver along with a couple of ulcers. He also gave me some Prilosec for the acid reflux, which never stopped. The Prilosec and I became good friends.

PBA: You were still on the job?

RO: Oh, yeah. It wasn’t until August 2007 that the real problems kicked in and I had to stay home. I can remember all the dates perfectly. I was planning a vacation with friends in Las Vegas, and on August 7, I went to see one of my friends about the trip. He looks at me like he’s seen a monster. Not only is my face yellow, but even my eyes! You don’t have to be an expert in jaundice to know it when you see it. I go to the doctor, he does some tests. But he says okay, go to Las Vegas, but make sure you call me about the results of the tests. I do, and he tells me to forget the slots, to get back to New York for an ultrasound test on the 13th. I do the ultrasound on the 13th, an MRI on the 14th, and a catscan on the 15th. On the afternoon of the 15th, the doctor tells me they’ve discovered cholangiocarcinoma, a cancer of the bile duct. Then the real siege started.

PBA: And did you end up in street fights?

RO: Oh, yeah. One time I had the mother of an EDP jump me screaming not to shoot her son because he was waving around this knife. Another time I had a guy trying to stab me with one of those lighter blade things. I just kept pounding him on the chest so as not to be stabbed. A sergeant told me later I would’ve been perfectly within my rights to shoot him in selfdefense, but then and there that didn’t occur to me. I didn’t want to work in the hardware store because I didn’t want to be doing the same thing day in and day out. Well, I never had that problem at the 47.

PBA: What did you do at the WTC?

RO: The day of the attack I was off. But two or three days later we went down for guard duty at West and Vesey Streets, not quite the pile but right where they were loading up the trucks with all the debris. I knew something was wrong because whenever they’d load up the trucks, this Army guy would come out in one of these suits you see in those movies about nuclear radiation. The hood over his head, the whole spaceman thing. And he’d power wash every one of the trucks before they could go uptown. The trouble with that was that it would send debris into the air. That was an area where there was always a breeze anyway, so dust was always being blown all over. We did 12- hour tours, and you couldn’t even open a container of coffee without exposing it to the garbage flying around. The federal government had to know what the threat was because they had EPA boxes on the parking meters to check air quality. PBA: How long did you spend there? RO: Overall it came to about 200 hours spread over three months. The worst part, at least at first, was when you’d go home and try to get the smell off your body. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but I had to brush my teeth for about 20 minutes and then, after that, make sure I reached every hair in my nose with soap. You missed one hair, you went to bed with the stink.

PBA: How so?

RO: The first thing they did was put stents in the bile duct. Doing that, they found more cancer or confirmed what they had already suspected. I went to Sloan- Kettering for an operation, went under, but then came out of the anesthetic again without them doing anything. Why? Because when they opened me up, they found a Stage Four Klatsin Tumor in my liver. That seemed to knock them out because Klatsins are rare for people my age. But the tumor wasn’t content doing its worst for my liver, it was also pressing down on my blood vessels so there was no blood flow. When I asked the doctor if I was a candidate for a liver transplant, he said no, the cancer alone disqualified me. PBA: But they decided to treat the tumor? RO: There was a month there between August 22 and September 19 when anything that could go wrong did go wrong. I had three different stays in the hospital to deal with everything from conjunctivitis to not being able to remove conjunctivitis tubes from my body. They couldn’t operate and told me I had only months to live. When I asked them about chemo treatment instead, they said the tumors had to shrink first, and they weren’t shrinking. For Christmas that year the treat was a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. Then my veins started going, and they had to put in a port.

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