Posted on 09/10/2011 7:00:19 PM PDT by paterfamilias
My recollections of September 11th are not very exciting: I was far away from the destruction, but like many New Yorkers, I was personally touched.
I am a doctor, and, at the time, I was an attending physician at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, in northern Manhattan, at the highest point of Manhattan Island, aptly named Washington Heights.
September 11, 2001 was a gloriousy beautiful day: crisp September air, clear blue skies, no clouds, not a hint of haze. I went to our scheduled Infectious Disease conference, and at near the end of the conference, our divisonal secretary rushed into the conference room and said that something terrible had happened, that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
I went to the main hospital building by way of an enclosed elevated footbridge between buildings: from that vantage point, ten storeys above the street and probably five miles north, I could see black smoke rising from the World Trade Center, staining the clear blue sky.
By the time I reached the hospital, I joined patients in their lounge watching the news on the television, and saw the first tower collapse.
A major trauma center, in no time we were on emergency alert: elective patients were being discharged, all elective surgery was cancelled, and all staff were instructed to stand by for further instructions as the casualties arrived. We waited. We waited some more. And then, about three hours later, we began to realize that we, at the northern tip of Manhattan, would not be needed, BECAUSE THERE WERE NO CASUALTIES. I had a very sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Before the phone service went out, I was able to contact my wife, who runs my office, and asked her to try and contact one of my oldest and favorite patients who was in the first World Trade Center bombing, and still worked as a legal secretary there. Unfortunately, the lines were out, and we could not contact her. (We later found out that she had taken the day off, and was safe and sound in Staten Island!) Our daughter, then an undergraduate at Columbia University, did not answer her phone, but was able to send us an email that she was okay. Our son was safely in his high school, a few blocks from my 79th Street office. So, our immediate family were all safe.
The subways were out, but I was able to get a ride to my office: there, I sat zombie-like, listening to the radio. We had no office patients , since they, too, were transfixed by the events of the day. We left the office late, in case any of the boys in my son's school needed a ride to points North. When we walked out onto the street, even though we were about two miles form Ground Zero, there was a thin coating of ash on all of the parked cars, and the acrid smell of a burning building. It was a smell of death.
The next day, I did not bother going to work. I watched television, vacillating between the nauseating reality and a sense of hopefulness gained from the words of our leaders like Mayor Giuliani, Governor Pataki, and President Bush. By the end of the week, the subways were running, telephone service was restored, and we New Yorkers started the process of carrying on.
I was luckier than most. I lost only one friend, a high school classmate. But everybody I know lost somebody. As the son of a New York City firemen, the loss of our first responders, those heroes (and I do not use that term loosely) who rushed into certain death, hit me personally. I never realized when I was a boy, that it was a possibility that my father might not come home from work one day.
We have a tendency to forget pain. That is how we are programmed to survive.
However, I will never forget September 11, 2001. Never.
Thank you for sharing your memories!
terror attack !!!
http://biggovernment.com/bmccarty/2011/09/10/was-the-deadly-shooting-at-bus-station-on-eve-of-9-11-anniversary-a-terror-attack/
Thank you for posting your story tonight.
good friend of mine, at that time was a nurse at NYU Medical Center. NYU, and another hospital, in lower Manhattan ( whose name escapes me as I type this ) were immediately mobilized, just as you described at Columbia. They had hardly any casualties, though they were somewhat busy treating first responders. But the emotional let-downs were drastic..across all staff...as she described it to me later on....your're all amped up, psyched up..ready to go..this is what you've trained for..then...nothing...and soon afte , it starts to hit you..why there are no arriving patients. At NYU..one lady walked into the ER with chest pains..she's wasn't at ground zero..but when she saw the images on her TV...she thought she was having a hart attack. Later on, she described to the papers how some 20 or so doctors and nurses descended on her...all looking for something, anything..to do...
bttt
You must have felt so helpless and hopeless.
I was in Ontario on vacation with my husband. We were staying in a cottage with no TV. There was a radio and I tuned into get the weather before we headed out for the day’s activities. It was around 9-9:30 AM and the radio announcer kept saying, “This is an unprecedented catastrophe...” but didn’t say what the catastrophe was. By then, I guess it was assumed that everyone knew.
We called our son in the states and he told us what had occurred.
Our first instinct was to pack up and go home, but the borders were closed so we had to stay put another five days. When we finally did cross the border on the trip home, every nook and cranny of our SUV was searched.
It was frustrating being so far away and out of touch, but then again perhaps it was a blessing.
To all those who lost friends and loved ones, may the Lord’s comfort envelop you during this time of sorrow.
My wife was expecting our first baby by the end of the September 2001. Soon after arriving at work I heard the news, and watch the events through the web broadcast. Just before the second plane hit, I called my wife who was still sleeping and carefully and without alarm in my voice, so as not to disturb too much this expecting mother, told her to get up and turn on the news, a plane had crashed into the WTC.
10 Years later my son is in his room at this very moment is building the WTC out of his Legos
“Included in the death toll were hundreds of firefighters and rescue personnel who responded to the crashes at the World Trade Center site and who were in the process of rescuing those inside when the buildings collapsed.”
excerpt http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/9-11.aspx
Let’s always honor the firt responders, our heroes.
Thanks for your post. I remember feeling very bad for all the Medical people that day. I know everyone was immediately ready to assist, but there were almost no injured, just survivors or dead.
I don’t know if that is good or bad, but it is strange.
I guess it is good, considering the scale of destruction very few people died and very few were injured.
However, it seems there are some on going health issues for those people who continued to work at the site.
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