OT: A remembrance - where were you?

I was in my second year of residency in Portland, Maine.  We had finished morning report, and started to spread out through the hospital to get our work done.  I had just finished examining a patient, when I looked up, and saw the TV with the World Trade Center on fire.  I was too busy to stop, and kept going.  A little later, I was in another room, talking with another patient, the last person I had to see that morning, and asked them to fill me in on what was happening in New York, as he was glued to the TV.  He started to tell me they were not sure, some sort of terrible accident, and almost as soon as he said that, we watched live as the second plane hit the other tower.    

I went back to the work room the residents on our service used, and one of the interns on the service was on the phone, frantically calling people.  He was an older guy, who had come to medicine later in his life.  He was very frustrated and upset, and I asked him after he hung up what was going on.  Turned out his son worked in a kitchen a block from the World Trade Center.  He was trying to get him on the phone to see if he was ok, but he could not get through, and no one else in his family had heard from him.  I was the senior resident on the service that day, so I took his list, sent him home, and I and the other residents on the service went about getting done what needed to get done for his patients.  

He came in later the next day, and thanked me and the other residents on the service for covering for him.  We told him of course, and asked if he had gotten through.  He told us he had, about an hour before he came in to the hospital that morning.  

Today is the day my family celebrated my son's birthday.  He will be 14 tomorrow, on September 12th.  He was supposed to be born on the one year anniversary of 9/11/01, and I am happy he was kind of stubborn and waited another day so his birthday does not need to be forever tied to those events.  It is only now as a father, watching my boys grown up,  that I can begin to understand the hell that day must have been for this guy, and the relief he must have felt to hear his son on the phone that morning.  Unfortunately, so many others never had the chance to hear the voice of their loved ones again.  

Upper West Side Manhattan @ 92nd and Riverside

My girlfriend called - she was crying about the WTC.  She lived a block away so I said I'd come right over.  I wasn't sure what she was saying.  She said a plane hit the towers.  I was a recreational pilot and so I thought she meant a single engine GA aircraft.  I walked in the door and she said "one of the Towers - its gone"  I couldn't wrap my head around it.  I had interviewed with some federal agencies for counter terrorism jobs a few years earlier. The idea that bad stuff could happen was not foreign to me.  But without seeing the footage of the towers coming down that morning - I'm not sure I could have believed it.  But once I did see it - somehow managed to avoid seeing it a second time for years. It seemed the rest of the country needed to see it over and over on TV to process it happened.  I completely understand to the extent there is truth to that.  All we had to do was look at the empty sklyine downtown.  And of course a lot of people lost loved ones.  I was lucky in that regard.

In the days and weeks that followed, there was a very strong energy and love running through the city: spontaneous therapy and humanity everywhere, in the dog parks, volunteers heading downtown, people checking in with each other. It was tragic and beautiful. NYers (or maybe human beings) are at their best in a crisis.

Crossing the George Washington Bridge required a new level courage. The whole city infrastructure felt so vulnerable.  It is in-cred-ible, to my mind of 9/12/01, that nothing major has happened since.  Probably a good time to remember be grateful for the unseen work that our often-reviled intelligence community does.

outside of Chicago. There were rumors durng 2nd period that something happened in NYC. In 3rd period, which was gym class for me, there was a formal announcement.