PORT-AU-PRINCE — Airport lawn-care man Basaney Simon lost his right leg in last week’s earthquake. He fears it will cost him his job.

“I don’t know if they will have me back with one leg,” he said as he lay nursing his bandaged leg at a makeshift University of Miami emergency clinic here.

Simon is one of untold thousands of Haitians who lost limbs in the catastrophic earthquake that shook Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12.

He will struggle to rehabilitate in a city that thrives on physical labor, and doctors are predicting that many amputees will languish or even die without proper follow-up care, or access to prosthetic limbs or crutches.

His wife, Simon said, has already abandoned him for the countryside because he cannot provide for her and their 1-year-old son.

Statistics are not yet available for the number of new amputees, but some hospitals were reporting as many as 30 surgeries a day immediately following the quake, Mirta Roses, the director of the Pan American Health Organization, said Sunday.

“My impression [is that] there will be thousands of amputations — and that nearly half may have lost more than one limb,” she said.

Making the future all the more uncertain was the virtual destruction of Healing Hands for Haiti, the only full-time prosthetic limb manufacturer and rehabilitation clinic in Port-au-Prince. Organizers cannot enter their unsafe building to see whether more than $100,000 in prosthetic limb-making equipment can be salvaged.

The blow will be devastating in a country where women haul goods on their heads, men hawk fruits on the streets and families trudge up hills to their homes.

“This is a country where people, even before the earthquake, relied on their physical abilities,” said Dr. Colleen O’Connell, a Canadian who is on the board of Helping Hands and who arrived last week in Haiti to start seeing patients.

“Everything in this country is done by hand,” he said. “Even getting around in this country on roads with potholes doesn’t lend itself to anybody with a mobility problem.”

Also not equipped to handle the new amputees: Haiti’s workplaces, said Jean Chevalier, president of the Haitian Federation of Associations and Institutions of Handicap people. She said Haiti’s government will need to create jobs to accommodate the disabled.

The wave of amputees, their limbs crushed by falling debris and often infected with gangrene, will not face an easy recovery in a country where disabled people already are marginalized.

The injured, including student Lovely Janne, 25, will have to learn how to accomplish basic functions. She was left-handed but lost her left arm in the quake. Last week, at a clinic affiliated with the University of Miami medical school, Janne struggled to brush her teeth with her right hand.

“It is not easy,” she said.

At the UM clinic, medical personnel endeavor to keep the amputations clean to avoid infection. Nerves must be monitored for phantom limb pain. Most patients will require further surgeries to arrange muscles and skin to best fit a prosthetic, said Dr. Fernando Vilella, a Jackson Memorial Hospital orthopedic traumatologist.

Patients can also develop “contractures,” a condition in which the stub develops in a bended position, making it impossible to fit a prosthetic limb.

Without proper follow-up, many patients can suffer from cardiovascular problems, such as poor blood flow and heart problems, said Dr. Patrick DeHeer, a podiatrist who founded the foundation Wound Care for Haiti.

“Just the energy that is required on one leg versus two can kill people,” said DeHeer, who is in Port-au-Prince cleaning wounds.

In about six to eight weeks, many patients could be ready for the first of several fittings for artificial limbs, which need to be replaced several times in the initial months after an amputation.

“The concern I have is follow-up — that we don’t lose them. It will be hard to track these people down if they head out into the provinces or frontiers,” said Al Ingersoll, a Minneapolis prosthetist and Healing Hands member in Haiti working on relief efforts.

In the wreckage, 10 years’ worth of Healing Hands supplies are gone.

Among them: a large oven used to mold plastic into limbs; 180 sheets of polypropylene, colored brown to reflect the population’s skin tone; crutches, wheelchairs, plus rehab parallel bars and weights.

And so far, they haven’t been able to locate many patients. When they surface, Healing Hands hopes to begin pairing previous patients with new amputees to start psychological counseling.

Adjusting in Haiti will be no easy task, previous amputees say.

Louimene Cetoute, 54, a street candy saleswoman, lost her left foot several years ago when a truck plowed into her. After that, she resorted to odd jobs, occasionally washing clothes.

“It’s too difficult to sell candy with one leg,” she said.

For some, work is all but impossible — and their lives are wretched.

Franck Rosseau lost his right leg in 1994 in a car wreck. He has no job, and amid the downtown looting last week, his only recourse was to offer to sell a reporter his crutches.

Vuergenile Thomas, 75, has no right leg. Neighbors feed her but she lives on the street in the Nazon neighborhood. She refuses crutches, instead using her hands to crawl in a sitting position, dodging traffic and dragging along two burlap sacks.

A new generation of amputees knows their plight won’t be easy. Many have never considered prosthetic legs.

That includes Valentine Romulus, 21, a baby-faced student housed in the UM clinic who winced as his mother helped him put on a pair of burgundy basketball shorts. He lost his left foot in the quake.

Even before the earthquake, his hope for a job was bleak.

“You can’t get work with one foot in Haiti,” he said. “If I was in the USA, maybe I could work.”