STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- To step foot in Edward Wallace's basement is to understand something fundamental about the retired detective: He would do most anything for his city.
Wood paneling is wallpapered with plaques, merit citations, awards, promotion certificates and diplomas, all earned during his 20 years with the New York Police Department.
Hanging in the center of the accolades is a homemade, postcard-perfect photograph of the city's nighttime skyline, the World Trade Center peeking out from behind the Empire State Building radiating red, white and blue.
But since Sept. 11, 2001, Wallace's devotion has all but washed away under the corrosive one-two punch of physical pain and medical bills. Now the 43-year-old Eltingville resident, who rushed to aid in the recovery at Ground Zero just after his brother, who died of brain cancer, was buried on Sept. 15, says his mayor and the NYPD have walked away from him.
Wallace spent five months shuttling between Ground Zero, Fresh Kills and the morgue as a member of the Crime Scene Unit. Now, he can no longer open jars because his joints constantly ache. Patches of burning red bumps flare up across his body, tumors swell beneath his skin and acid swims in his mouth.
And of course, there's the cough. The ever-present dry hack was his first symptom, kicking in a year after the attacks. Major surgery soon followed, so doctors at Staten Island University Hospital could cut out three sections of his lung.
The biopsies revealed he had sarcoidosis, a disease in which clusters of cells swell and attack organs like the eyes, liver, kidney, skin and, most commonly, the lungs, according to the American Lung Association. One benign tumor on Wallace's hip had grown to the size of a tennis ball when the doctor excised it.
"You look at my medicine chest and see all these medicines there, and you would think I was a senior citizen," said Wallace in his basement one recent night, as his wife Margaret, also a retired first-grade detective, sat nearby with their two sons, Ian, 15, and Brandon, 10.
The medications and doctors visits cost Wallace hundreds of dollars a month in co-pays, which he manages to finance through working as a forensic consultant and teaching classes in counter-terrorism tactics.
Still, anxiety runs high that any day his insurance provider will cut him off, realizing it is wrongly paying to treat illnesses contracted on the job, and therefore the legal responsibility of the police pension system.
When Wallace retired on his 20th year on the job in 2004, the police department rejected his claim that sarcoidosis was a line-of-duty injury. But in addition to sarcoidosis, Wallace has been diagnosed with dermatitis and eosinophilic esophagitis, a disease marked by inflamed white blood cells that attack the esophagus and eat away its lining.
All three of Wallace's diseases appear on the Pataki presumptive bill list.
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