Grim-faced relatives yesterday told a critically injured Long Island dad that doctors wouldn’t be able to reattach his left arm — which he had blown off with illegal fireworks.
“What’s the extent of the damage?” a still-dazed Eric Smith, 36, scribbled with his right hand to kin from his hospital bed.
“He didn’t realize how far it [the limb] was gone,” said Smith’s uncle, Paul Gilbert.
“He lost his whole arm,” Gilbert, 53, told The Post. “He’s going to have a rough road . . . a couple of tough weeks ahead of him. They could not attach the arm. It’s severed from the shoulder down.”
Smith’s wife, Tania, saw the horrifying accident from her kitchen window.
“I ran out to see if he was alive,” she said, her eyes glistening with tears.
She said her husband “is more worried about us than himself . . . I could use some prayers.”
The couple has two kids.
Smith had been trying to shoot one of the explosives from a makeshift launcher in front of his Fairview Avenue home in Islip Terrace shortly before 6 p.m. Saturday when it fired into his shoulder, authorities said.
Friends and relatives who were attending a barbecue in Smith’s back yard rushed around to the front after hearing the boom.
Smith — who works for the Long Island Rail Road — “kept groaning, ‘Oh, man, I messed up. I really messed up,’ ” one witness said.
A neighbor said Smith loved his holiday gig.
“I even told him when he set one [firework off] at around 5 p.m. ‘You can’t wait until it gets dark?’ He was ready to go,” he said.
Additional reporting by Edmund DeMarche