Charlie Giles had made his peace with death just before 10:30 a.m. on September 11, 2001.

Giles, now 43 and a Barnegat resident, had raced to the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan to coordinate the rescue efforts of several private ambulance companies after American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the North Tower.

When he got a call of a man down in the North Tower's mezzanine, he grabbed a defibrillator and headed in.

"All of a sudden you hear all sorts of metal clanging," he said. "You see dust, you see rock, people running, saying 'It's coming down, it's coming down.'"

The firefighter he tried to save had flatlined. Giles couldn't move him. He ran for his life, but fell on the escalator. He thought he knew, then, that he wouldn't make it out.

But a Port Authority cop grabbed him and another man. Just 50 feet from the doors, they crouched as the tower collapsed around them, burying them in rubble and darkness. After radioing for help, the men were dug out. Giles got treated for burns, checked himself out of the hospital the same day and went back to Ground Zero. He kept going back for 101 days.

Giles survived 9/11, but the World Trade Center attacks are killing him just the same. Like so many other first responders who were there, he's fighting a long list of health problems, including scarred and ruined lungs destroyed by the toxic Ground Zero dust.

That's why the triumph and joy he felt when the Senate signed the bill providing $4.2 billion for health care for 9/11 first responders Dec. 22 was tinged with frustration and sadness. For Giles and others, including many Shore-area rescuers who risked their lives that day, the bill comes too late to do anything but ease some of the financial pain for the families they will leave behind.

Still, they're celebrating, and feeling thankful. And they're hoping the government's promise of help at last will bring real relief.

"It was bittersweet for me," said Giles, who has been given 17 separate diagnoses –  reactive airway disease, chronic bronchial asthma, pericarditis, osteoporosis. He takes 39 medications to stay alive, and is now mostly bed-confined. "My health is gone," he said.

Giles' friend and fellow Barnegat resident Harold Smith – Smitty, to anybody who knows him – shares the sentiment.

Smitty, an NYPD narcotics sergeant, was also at Ground Zero in the wake of the towers' collapse.

"They gave you a paper mask and said 'Go down there,'" said the soft-spoken father of three. For two months, he worked in the landfill where the rubble was taken, sifting through debris for human remains.

"It takes a toll on you," he said. Emotionally, and, it turns out, physically. Smith retired with a regular pension in 2007 afer 20 years on the force, but in 2008, "everything started happening."

He has stage 4 kidney cancer, which has metastasized. "Masses in my spine, masses in my lung, my pubic bone, my pelvis," he said. "It's all over my body." Smith, who is in his 40s and was healthy until he was diagnosed, has little doubt his illness is a result of his work following 9/11.

And in the last two years, he's come to fear the walk to the mailbox.

"You get a bill every day," he said. "It's a burden on your mind."

Smith, Giles and their families are waiting to learn exactly what the new bill will mean for them, and what kind of reimbursement they'll see. The men said they each have about $250,000 in medical debts. Giles lost his house. Smith has a stack of bills a foot high.

"I don't care about the money," said Smith. "I'd rather have my health back. But it is what it is. You gotta play with the cards you're dealt."

Giles, who has been a vocal proponent of a bill to pay for 9/11 first responders' medical costs for years, said the support he's received from other Barnegat residents has helped him through.

"It's a tight-knit community," he said. "They wrapped themselves around everybody."

And though both men said worries lingered about how and when the federal government would offer them its own support, they both said the bill was about as good a Christmas gift as they could get.

"There are three important days in my life," Giles said. The first, he said, is the day he married his wife Diane, his caretaker, his rock. The second is the day earlier this year that he fully adopted their two daughters.

"The third most important day in my life is Dec. 22, 2010," Giles said. "Nine years of fighting. We got, finally, what we had been asking for."