HermanH said:
How many of you remember what you were doing that day?
I was still at home, running late that morning. I actually heard United 175 go into Tower 2, but I didn't realize it at the time what it was. Next thing I know, the hospital's paging me, and I'm yelling at my then-girlfriend as to what happened while I'm trying to get my shoes on.
I happen to live right by the Brooklyn Bridge on the Brooklyn side, and even though they had already shut down the Brooklyn Bridge, I was permitted to pass through since I had my hospital ID. I remember looking up at the burning towers, thinking to myself, "What kind of planes hit them?!", and then following a FDNY ladder company across the Bridge. Who knows how many of those firefighters didn't go home that night.
We more or less had our command center set up by the time I got to work, and we got busy: how many patients could we discharge? Hold up the OR's, we need to have them available for casualties. How's NYU Downtown Hospital doing? (They're our sister hospital, and only five blocks away from Ground Zero.) Then we heard the Pentagon was hit, and for a brief, fleeting moment, I got scared; what in hell is going on here? But then, it was back to work.
Tower 2 collapsed as I was on the phone with someone, I looked up at the TV after the collapse had already started. Tower 1 collapsed as I was on the 'Net in my office, trying to get more information. They took out NYUDH's water lines, and suddenly, NYUDH had no way to generate steam to sterlize instruments, and meanwhile, they've got trauma cases needing to go to the OR's. We set up a shuttle system where they would send up dirty instruments, we'd sterilize them and then send them back down.
WTC 7 went down sometime that afternoon (side note: I had just paid a visit to WTC 7 to visit the city's Office of Emergency Management in May 2001, and I still have my visitor's pass from that visit. Somehow, I had never thrown it away, and found it in my desk a few weeks after 9/11/01), taking out communications and power lines for NYUDH. Now, they were really deaf, dumb and blind. We worked harder to support them, taking transfers from them and coordinating emergency medical supplies for them and FDNY EMS.
After I made sure that my g/f, her brother and my mom were all okay, I got off my shift in the command center around 7 pm. They needed someone with a car to run sterile instruments to NYUDH -- our van was in the outer boroughs dropping off stranded patients -- so I volunteered, and drove into an area of pitch-black (for those of you in NYC, it was exactly like the Blackout in August), except for the hospital. Dust was everywhere, it was eeriely quiet. I dropped off the instruments in NYUDH's emergency department and wanted to walk over to Ground Zero, when I realized that I didn't have my fire helmet -- I had left it at home. (I carry it in the car now.) I came back to my hospital.
Made another run to NYUDH around 10 pm, and called it a night. I slept in my office, in case we needed to gear back up -- we were getting word to expect 500 patients to come out of "the pile", but no ETA. Sadly, as everyone knows, only a handful of people were pulled out alive, not 500.
The next morning came, and as I woke up and stumbled into the command center, I kept asking myself if it had only been a dream...sadly, it wasn't.
Andy