9/11 Cancer Killed Him. First He Had to Prove He Was There.

Michael Dorian was a veterinary technician living with AIDS when the towers fell. He put on scrubs, got past the barricades at Ground Zero, and spent 24 hours on the pile pouring saline into the eyes of firefighters blinded by asbestos and concrete dust. Fifteen years later he was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive skin cancer that had already reached stage 4, one of tens of thousands of 9/11-linked cancer diagnoses that keep accumulating decades after the attacks.

His friend Neil Adams, author of From The Pile, joins Joelle Kaufman to tell the rest of it: the fight with the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, which refused to accept the respirator, blanket, and World Trade Center debris Michael had kept in a box for fifteen years as proof he was ever there. What finally qualified him for $100,000-a-course experimental treatment was a single television interview he had nearly forgotten, and the search for that tape became a news story of its own.

This episode is about what Michael did with the years while he fought. Two death sentences, one at sixteen and one at fifty, and a life organized entirely around putting small unexpected good things in front of other people. Joelle calls those happiness tripwires. Michael planted thousands of them.

Kicking Cancer's Ass is about being the CEO of your own cancer journey.

Topics:

• A vet tech in scrubs walks onto the pile

• Twenty-four hours flushing firefighters' bleeding eyes
• Why the debris he saved wasn't proof
• The tape that had been recorded over
• What actually counts as evidence of exposure
• Health Program eligibility is wider than you think
• Registering with the VCF isn't filing a claim
• Happiness tripwires, laid on purpose, while dying