By Rami Amichay

NAHARIYA, Israel, July 8 (Reuters) - In Israel, you either learn to live with fear or die a little every day.

So trying to consign bad memories to the back of my mind, I found myself filming rockets from Gaza falling on the southern town of Sderot, a year after shrapnel from a Katyusha rocket from Lebanon tore into my left leg in northern Israel.

On July 13 last year -- one day into the unexpected Lebanon war -- I was racing through the Galilee town of Nahariya on assignment for Reuters Television. Rockets launched by Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas had been exploding in the streets.

Along with other journalists, I entered a broad, tree-lined square when a Katyusha hit with a roar just to my right. I could feel the concussion and the searing heat. My left leg began bleeding heavily. It hurt like hell.

I tumbled out of the car carrying my camera and took cover in the entrance of a building. I stood up and leaning on my healthy leg I managed to film as a fire caused by the rocket ripped through a building across the street.

Minutes later, as I began to realise that the pain was not going away and the bleeding was not stopping, an ambulance arrived. The paramedics bandaged me up hastily, loaded me into the ambulance and took me to the nearest hospital.

As we drove off with sirens wailing, all I could think of was my colleague, a cameraman from an Israeli channel, who had been filming me. Soon his pictures would be broadcast in Israel and abroad.

I wanted to call my wife so she didn't have to suffer the shock of seeing me wounded if she turned on the TV, but I couldn't lay my hands on a phone. Fortunately, a friend managed to alert her before she had a chance to watch the news.

At the hospital, surgeons went straight to work to try and stop the massive blood loss from the main artery, severed by shrapnel, in my leg.

The shrapnel, lodged against a main nerve is still there: doctors feared extricating it would cause further damage. I now carry a permit that alerts security guards about the hidden metal that I cannot remove prior to a metal-detector scan.

SLOW RECOVERY

My rehabilitation process was five months of nerve-wracking doctors' visits, strenuous physiotherapy and exercise.

But with the support of a loving wife, family and friends the time passed quickly and I began to miss my job, which normally keeps me so active and mobile in contrast to the sedentary months spent recuperating.

Last December, I returned to work with a noticeable limp and a leg that gets tired and cramped, usually at the most awkward moments.

Over the past three months, I have spent hours filming in Sderot, a town in the south often targeted by rocket-firing Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip.

One afternoon, rocket warning sirens went off as I sat in a Sderot restaurant. Instinctively, I picked up my camera and starting filming from my seat as people rushed for shelter.

Glancing up, I noticed that the restaurant only had a thin, tin roof covering the dining area. A sudden, sickening feeling of fear and helplesness shook me to the core.

But it passed and I carried on with my work, one eye on the viewfinder and one eye on the real world.

It is in that real world that my nine-year-old son sounds a cautionary note as I drop him off at school: "Dad," he says, "don't go to work in the danger zone today."

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