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Robert Joseph, a former NYPD officer, has braces on both knees and gout in almost every joint in his body.

"The only place I don't have it yet is my neck and my back," the 39-year-old said. "Thank God."

Joseph, whose kidneys function at 60 percent, said a good day is one where he doesn't need crutches and isn't going to the hospital. His doctors at the Mt. Sinai World Trade Center Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program have seen several other similar cases and believe his condition is related to the 21 days he worked on rescue, recovery and cleanup operations at Ground Zero.

"They still have not figured out where it's coming from," Joseph said. "They don’t know if it's an auto-immune disorder. ... They know it's from the toxins, they just don’t know how to stop it."

Joseph and about 200 people filled a large meeting room in Lower Manhattan this week to meet the woman who will run the World Trade Center Victims Compensation Fund: Sheila Birnbaum, the VCF's Special Master, who came to meet many of the applicants whose financial fate she'll help decide.

Birnbaum, speaking to a working class group of claimants, talked about growing up in the Bronx, going to public school and city college and doing a stint as a public school teacher before going to law school and joining the high-profile Skadden, where she co-directs the mass torts practice, litigating class-action and other law suits usually worth tens and hundreds of millions of dollars.

"I've tried to give compensation to people," Birnbaum told the prospective claimants. "Sometimes we did it really right, and sometimes we didn't do it so right. But I can promise you that we will be fair, that we will be transparent. That we want to hear from the community, and that we want to do the best we can with what we have to work with."

What Birnbaum has to work with is $2.8 billion and very strict criteria from Congress, which authorized the VCF through the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, which was passed with great fanfare by local lawmakers late last year.

Birnbaum explained the Zadroga Act limits payments to people with certain physical conditions and explicitly bans payments for mental health problems, like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Cancers, she said, aren't on the list — but they're not off, either.

"We're going to look at the scientific and medical evidence. We're going to talk to the experts. And if we believe these can be related, we're going to add them to this list," Birnbaum said.

The main illnesses on the list are lung problems such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Others fall under musculo-skeletal disorders such as low back pain and carpal tunnel syndrome.

Jim Salvio, a former Department of Corrections captain who worked at Ground Zero for more than 1,000 hours, was glad to hear that he's not one of the people who may or may not qualify for an award.

"I have asthma. I have sinusitis, rhinusitis, GERD [gastro-esophageal reflux disorder], sleep apnea," Salvio said. "I even have the carpal tunnel syndrome. They say it's from all the digging constantly and the buckets. I've got everything on that list."

Even so, he hired an attorney, who will work on a contingency fee and take up to 10 percent of what Salvio gets from the VCF.

"He's familiar with what's covered, what's not covered, and he'd be a lot assertive than me," Salvio said. "I'd put in the paperwork, and then what am I supposed to do? I don’t know the ins and outs."

It's too early to say what the average monetary award will be, but in the original 2002-2004 VCF about 5,000 people shared a $7 billion pool.

This Fund will have about a third as much money — and anticipates many times more applicants.