"Nine Eleven"

So this is a bit of a bonus posting to commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and to answer the now-infamous question, "Where were you when..."

When the towers went down, I was in the first few weeks of my Surgery rotation in my third year of medical school.  My rotation happened to be at a hospital in the Bronx.  I remember walking through the hall outside the residents' rooms that morning, checking my pager after rounding with the residents.  We got bits of news, weather reports, jokes and the like on our little text pagers.  It said something about a small plane, possibly a Cessna, striking one of the Twin Towers, but they thought it was just a careless amateur pilot.  As the morning unfolded, however, we found out it was much more than that.  We turned on the TV in the residents' room, and watched in fascinated horror as the second plane hit, the towers came down, first one and then the second.  Our scheduled cases for the day were all canceled in preparation for mass casualties being evacuated out of the City.  There was a sense of anxiety, but also of some sort of excitement among the surgery residents - this was their chance to help, to participate, to shine.  I thought a great deal about my colleagues who were at St. Vincent's Hospital in NYC, wondering if friends and acquaintances were okay.  The longer that nothing happened and no one came to our hospital for help, the more the residents and my fellow students wanted to find a way into the City, to help in any way that we could.  We talked about walking across the bridges, entering the City and pitching in wherever we were needed.  In the end, we had to settle for staying put, because no one was allowed to leave the hospital, much less enter the City.  I remember trying to get through to my mom that morning, and being unable to connect because there was so much traffic on the phone lines that I just couldn't get a line through. 

We went to the top floor of my hospital, and on the horizon we could see columns of black smoke rising out of the City.  All roads and bridges in and out of NYC were closed down. The casualties that we were expecting to arrive never came, leaving us to sit and anxiously watch the TV, listen for news, and try to treat the patients that we did have in the hospital with the best, albeit distracted, care possible.  We felt impotent and helpless, able to see everything, and yet unable to reach out to those just miles away from us.  I finally got in touch with my family to let them know that I was okay, that we were waiting for the injured to come, but nothing was happening.  News started to arrive of other attacks in D. C., and another flight that went down in Pennsylvania somewhere.  All the major airports closed; the country locked down all routes in and out.

Even as I look back on it now, it all seems so surreal.  People ask me in amazement, "You were in New York for 9/11?" I can technically tell them yes, I was - but I feel like an imposter because I wasn't in Manhattan when the towers fell.  I didn't breathe the smoke, feel the heat, experience the terror first-hand.  Flashes linger in my mind from television broadcasts, and bits of memories of seeing the plumes of smoke on the horizon, talking with medical school friends and colleagues in the days to follow as they returned to Westchester from Manhattan, seeing the shock and disbelief on their faces, feeling their anxiety and fear as they recounted their experiences and tell of what they saw, and what they'll never forget.  I probably won't watch much of the coverage today, not because I don't want to remember - but because I can't seem to forget.