Injured Survivor Has a Healing Art

By Karen Freifeld | STAFF WRITER

September 18, 2001

Tina Camin hobbled her way across 57th Street in Manhattan yesterday afternoon on crutches, her left leg - broken during last Tuesday's terrorist attack - covered with stars and stripes, flight numbers of the hijacked planes and other significant details of Sept. 11, 2001.

It was the art director's way of coping with the tragedy that has changed her and so many other New Yorkers' lives.

On Camin's way to work at Lorelli Associates advertising agency that day, her train stopped in the World Trade Center just as the first plane hit. After evacuating, she went to the north side of the towers to call her mother and three children and tell them she was all right.

"That's when I saw the first bodies start to jump out," she recalled. "I don't think I can cry about that anymore."

Then the second plane hit, and flames and debris were everywhere.

"I thought I was going to die, the explosion was so incredible," she said. "I got caught in a stampede." Eventually she was helped up, but debris was flying and people screamed to get into the closest building.

Camin, 29, said she crawled into a film-developing store, and when she left, she realized she couldn't use her left leg.

Camin said she must have blacked out because she found herself in the arms of a man, a civilian, who carried her five blocks to an ambulance. It took her to NYU Medical Center downtown where, she said, they told her she had a fractured knee and three fractured ribs.

She's been struggling with both physical and emotional pain ever since.

"Last night, this was my therapy, just sitting at home, doing this," she said, pointing to the artwork and writing on the ankle-to-thigh brace with Velco straps on her left leg. "I've got all the flight numbers - "Flight 77 - and those lost at the Pentagon," "Flight 93 - Penn's and its heroes," "Flight 11, North Tower," and "Flight 175, South Tower," she read.

She also wrote "WTC" and "RIP" in block letters in red, white, and blue. She also gave a tribute to the police and fire departments with the words, "for the lives you saved and the lives you gave." But for the tattooed and nose-ringed Camin, the artwork on the brace is only the beginning.

"This is just until I can get a really big tattoo done," she said.

She said she was considering a tattoo on her leg of the American flag wrapping around the towers, maybe inked on the injured leg. She even posted an ad on Tattoo.com Sunday night "just explaining where I was and what I had been through, that I was grieving for those who were lost," hoping a tattoo artist would help her.

"This is something that will affect my life forever, and it's something I don't want to ever forget," she said. "I just want something on me every day that I will remember every person that was there, every person that was lost."