Part one of a three-part series. For Part 2, click here. For Part 3, click here.
Three years after Bruce Germyn watched a fireball rip through Lakeland Mills, he's still feeling the reverberations on his health.
"A huge part of me died. I'm nowhere near the man that walked out of there," says Germyn, who was working an edger on April 23, 2012, and was one of 22 men injured in the explosion that killed Glenn Roche and Alan Little.
"My face was blown off," he says of his skin. "I was a wreck."
Germyn suffered burns to roughly 40 per cent of his body and wore burn garments on his legs for six months.
One eye is damaged from the burn.
He used to wear dark glasses to protect from the light, but he grew tired of the stares.
"Every day is a roller coaster, it's frustration, lack of concentration," he says, adding he has memory and balance issues.
"I have very little motivation. I'm so focused on my injuries."
He's lost his sense of smell, but occasionally he'll get a whiff of some small scent.
At 140 pounds on a good day, he's lost 35 pounds since the disaster.
"I don't eat because I don't smell. My decision making is so shot that I can't even decide in the kitchen what I want to eat when I'm hungry," says Germyn, who also has tinnitus in his ears, describing it as "a squealing ringing that just doesn't go away."
There are various pains and muscle spasms that continue three years on, including a throbbing pain on the right side of his head.
"It just never goes away."
He's told he has a mild case of post-traumatic stress disorder, but to Germyn it doesn't feel mild. Memories of that night are never far off.
"I hear those cries daily. I hear them in my sleep," says Germyn, who was the only first aid attendant on the scene.
The recurring images haven't necessarily decreased over the years. He's just better at deflecting the thoughts when they come.
"For me, they just come back. Nothing has to bring 'em. I could be sitting in my chair. You just end up there. You don't need to go there, you just end up there."
Not much has changed, he says, or improved.
"Physically I look like I'm okay," says Germyn, but it's his brain that's proving the biggest hurdle.
If he doesn't vocalize what he's thinking right away, he forgets.
"That's a constant, ongoing. The brain just switches gears on me and, goes off on another tangent."
Reading is difficult, so he avoids it if he can.
"I can understand the beginning of a paragraph and by the time I get halfway to the end of it, it's gone."
He still isn't working, but wants that for his future, one where he sees himself living at "90 per cent" of who he once was, compared to the 30 per cent he feels he's at now.
"I can't be focused for eight hours. I can't even be focused to go to a grocery store with a list of three items and remember them," says Germyn, who had worked at the mill for six years.
Last year he tried to change his winter tires to summer. It took him four hours.
Germyn speaks quickly. The sentences make sense, but his mind picks up on tangents and his voice soon follows. Sometimes he goes over the same thought. He calls it the hamster wheel, how his mind rolls over and over, working towards the same purpose and never quite moving away from Lakeland.
To stop the frenzy of thoughts, he tries breathing. He paces constantly. He meditates.
"I spend most of my day pacing the house, my driveway, my yard. My brain is just constantly running in circles and going nowhere fast."
He forces himself to challenge his fear of crowds, making regular trips to the mall: "I don't look at people, I walk with my head down."
He calls it exposure therapy. Some of the 22 survivors hide in their homes, he says.
"We have a hard time being around people. I feel worried about people watching me, looking at me."
Germyn was one of the first to testify at the coroner's inquest and he says the process has done nothing to bring him closure.
"It's actually made it worse. This inquest has pushed me further back," said Germyn, who has been going every day.
"You're sitting in a courtroom and all these people are being exposed for their failure and then they say 'Nothing you can do about it now.' My whole fight and ordeal with this inquest in all of this is to make change for all employees."
Germyn diligently checks in with other survivors who aren't working like him: nine still, he says.
"The sad thing is the only people we normally associate with now are fellow workers. It's hard to be friends with people when you're so consumed... you're so caught in the before, during and after the explosion," says Germyn.
He gets scared when he hears some of his friends saying "I don't know if I can live like this," but disagrees when doctors tell him he's depressed.
"I don't think I'm depressed, I think I'm frustrated, I'm confused and I'm angry about what has happened and how I'm being treated. I don't feel bad it happened to me. I feel I was put in that mill for this reason... to fight for the good of all."
He knows that his obsession affects his family. About nine months ago his daughter warned him about what it was doing to them: "You know that there's a good chance you may lose your whole family and everything in all that you're doing. Do you realize that?" Germyn remembers her saying.
But he can't close that chapter.
"We've had a lot of conversations in the past three years about the way I am. They're saying I need to change.
"I wish I could, I wish I could get up and this would all be behind me and I can push forward but until there's accountability and until they're just willing to recognize my injuries I can't go anywhere."
