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Salsa Circuit
Trapped for three days last year in the rubble of Haiti's devastating earthquake, all George Exantus could think about was doing the salsa on a brightly-lit stage.
For him, dancing was life or death, and even after being rescued and having his right leg amputated below the knee, Exantus dreamed of the day he'd be back in step.
With the help of a team of Israeli doctors, Exantus received a state-of-the-art prosthetic and months of intense rehabilitation.
Now, Exantus is not only able to dance again. He looks like he hasn't missed a beat.
The miracle dancer will show off his skills in New York Sunday at Manhattan's annual Celebrate Israel Parade.
After the event, Exantus will dance in a concert in Central Park, the culminating twist on his road to recovery.
"The will to dance is what kept my spirits up," Exantus told the Post. "I did not think I would live to see another day. The whole experience was scary and frantic. By the grace of God am I only here today."
The catastrophic, 7.0-magnitude earthquake that killed 220,000 people and left 1.5 million Haitians homeless Jan. 12, toppled Exantus' apartment building, and pinned the dancer's feet and left hand under cement blocks for three days.
"I was praying a lot to be rescued," Exantus said. "I slept. I was very hot, very sweaty. I had a feeling I was going to die."
Exantus' prayers were answered when friends found him and dug him out.
But the damage had already been done. His right leg had been crushed so severely that it had to be amputated just below his knee.
His left leg wasn't much better. Exantus, 28, had a deep wound in his heel and had tendon damage that made it difficult for him to bend his toes.
Then, there was severe nerve damage to his left hand.
"He couldn't straighten his fingers, his wrist or his elbow," said Tzaki Siev-Ner, the Israeli surgeon who treated Exantus. "It was actually a useless limb."
A friend of Exantus happened to be a manager at a Port-au-Prince Hotel where the Israeli doctors were staying.
Exantus was fitted for a prosthesis to replace the leg that he lost. But unless Exantus had the other problems treated, he would barely have been able to hold a crutch.
To repair the arm's nerve damage and restore Exantus "good leg," Exantus was flown to Israel by a group associated with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was providing relief assistance to earthquake victims.
There, he also got the intense rehabilitation and the $20,000 prosthesis he needed to get him back on the dance floor.
"Eight months after the operation I started dancing again," said Exantus, a champion salsa dancer before the earthquake.
Siev-Ner and his team of doctors treated hundreds of earthquake victims, but Exantus is their best story of success.
"It is hard work," Siev-Ner said. "It doesn't finish with operation. It doesn't finish with good prosthesis. Everything is important. But the most important thing is very hard daily training."
The proof isn't in Exantus' wide smile, but in a popular video that's making the rounds of YouTube.
In it Exantus, in a staged show, walks on stage with crutches and asks a young woman to dance. Then he straps on his new leg, tosses the crutches aside and shimmies and kicks like he just won "Dancing With the Stars."
"Beyond his own success and return to life and dancing, I'm sure he's giving hope to many others like him," Siev-Ner said. "He's a role model."
Exantus said he never gave up hope.
"It hurt me deeply to experience the loss of my leg," Exantus said. "It's something too difficult to explain. But I knew I was going to dance again."
Source CHRISTINA CARREGA, SHARNICE CYPRIEN and LEONARD GREENE
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