A Decade of Hope (10 page)

 

We have served our patients, our firefighters, in a 9/11 medical program that has sustainability at the highest levels. Mayor [Rudy] Giuliani and Mayor Bloomberg had exactly the same commitment as ours. Commissioner Von Essen, Commissioner [Nicholas] Scoppetta, and now Commissioner [Sal] Cassano have all had exactly the same commitment as ours. But what counts the most is the patient, and the patient is only going to get these services if the program survives.

This kind of partnership and cooperation is unheard of in a postdisaster, postcataclysmic event. Our retention rate for medical monitoring is over 90 percent. If you look at the Department of Defense medical programs, or the people involved in the early efforts to build the A bomb, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at Three Mile Island, or at any environmental or occupational catastrophe, you will find there is no medical program that has participation above 50 percent, and most of them are happy with 30 percent participation. But we have over 90 percent participation. That is unheard of. That is an amazing, amazing thing.

People often ask me, How do you balance a very active professional life, in which you need to continually be at the top of your game, with a family life, where you have children and a wife or husband who need your time? My answer is that each got a little less time than it deserved, and unfortunately the family got the shorter end of that stick. So my wife spent most of the time with the kids, while I spent quality time either in the evenings or sometimes on a Saturday. But they have grown from great kids to great adults, so no regrets there, except when I look back and see so many photographs that I'm not in. But I was there for every problem. I'm a problem solver to begin with, and both my kids and my wife had come to understand that the family is a team, and each member of the team should do what they do best. And since problem solving is what I do best, they came to use me for that. And it gives me purpose still.

Consideration of family is not just a decision that physicians make. Many busy career people have the same challenge to a lesser or greater consequence, depending on the type of career they have. What I think is very important for a physician is to accumulate life experiences that make you more than a scientist. Patients don't come to you for your scientific knowledge—they expect that, but that's not what they need. They need some level of humanity. You can't have that—or at least most of us can't have that—if we don't live a life of happiness, but also one of sorrow. Those are the things that allow you to connect with patients on a human level, and the fascinating thing about the Fire Department is, it allows the firefighter to connect with you.

To me the Fire Department represents small-town U.S.A. If you ever wanted to be a small-town physician in an urban environment, hook up with a fire department, because it is, in itself, a small town. It's an extended family.

My wife died last year, under tragic circumstances. I had to call the Fire Department to find her body, because the local police and fire departments, in the area of New Jersey where this happened, did not seem to be taking the necessary steps. She drowned, and nobody was around when it happened. There was a boat dock, and it was a very windy, cold night. My wife was wearing a bulky coat, and we believe that she slipped on the dock and fell. She was distraught, very upset, and we think it was just a bad culmination of events. I needed help, so I spoke to some of the chiefs in the FDNY, and they volunteered to assist me. They in turn got various levels of commissioners to agree to help, and to ultimately find my wife's body. Rescue 1 and Marine 1 received the appropriate approvals and searched the waters of New Jersey until they found her.

And so the whole Fire Department knows about my life and, since then, I've had patients connect with me in ways that had never happened before. I've now lived yet another set of experiences, and I can connect with them better. But that's truly underestimating the issue, for what happened is that those firefighters who suffered similar issues and losses after 9/11 now feel more comfortable in sharing their problems with me. It is a great responsibility, but it is such an amazing gift to be allowed into people's lives. I am so much the better, both as a human being and as a physician, for having had these experiences. I wish my wife was still alive—I wish every day that she was still alive. But everything that happens to you, I truly feel, happens for a reason. It's up to us to accommodate or integrate our experiences. We don't know the reasons they happen. That plan is far above us. But it is up to us to try to find a way to take bad things and make them good.

This is what I've been doing, for the weeks, months, and years since 9/11, and will continue to do.

When the North Tower fell at 10:28 A.M. on September 11, it brought the total number of men and women killed at the World Trade Center to 2,749. In the midst of this carnage a miraculous and inexplicable event took place: Somehow, when the collapse of this mass of 4.4 million square feet of floor space ended, it left a small open space buttressed by fallen concrete and steel. In this space were twelve firefighters, a Port Authority police officer, and a woman named Josephine Harris. Some minutes before the collapse, Captain Jay Jonas and the men of Ladder 6 had come across Josephine as they hurried to exit the tower, knowing that it was about to fall. She was in great distress, taking only one step at a time as she descended, and she pleaded with them, “Help me.” At that moment Captain Jonas and his men determined to take this woman with them, recognizing that she could cost them their lives.

 

 

 

W
hen the collapse started, I was on the fourth floor, looking for a chair for the woman we were rescuing, Josephine Harris. She had a serious case of flat feet and could not walk normally. She is a big woman, and taking the stairs was even more difficult for her. It was an agonizing and slow progress, one step at a time. The South Tower had already collapsed; I could not imagine how many people were already dead. It was just a matter of seconds or minutes before this one would begin to fall. We needed a chair to carry her so that we could run out of the building with her.

I didn't realize it at the time, but the guys I had working for me that day really didn't understand what kind of danger we were in. We had met Captain Billy Burke [see page 182] from Engine 21 when we were still going up the stairs, and when we felt some shaking in the building, he said, “You go check the north windows and I'll go check the south windows.” We did that, and then we had a conversation. I thought he was going tell me that a piece fell off the roof, maybe causing a partial collapse in our building. But he said, with kind of a straight face, “The South Tower just collapsed.”

I said to my men, “It's time for us to get out of here.” They looked at me a little funny, for we'd just climbed twenty-seven floors with a hundred pounds of gear on our backs, and now I'm telling them to do an about-face and go down the stairs. But they knew, they understood. They said, “Okay, Cap,” and wanted to start jettisoning some of their equipment, but I told them, “No, keep your equipment with you. Keep your tools with you. You never know; we may need them on the way down.”

I'm sure that whatever leadership traits I developed came from observing some of the lieutenants and captains and chiefs that I worked for or with. One thing they all had in common is that the most effective leaders were the ones who remained calm under the highest stress. The more stressful a given situation got, I would consciously slow my speech down and speak softly. That's what I was doing on that day. Billy Butler was in front of me with Josephine's arm over his shoulders, and I would kind of talk to him in a conversational tone, and slowly ask, “Billy, can you move a little faster?”

All of my men—Tommy [Falco], Billy [Butler], Sal Bagastino—came up to me afterward and said, “How were you able to keep it together the way you did? Knowing what you knew, and you didn't cause us any anxiety?” I told them that while I may have been calm on the outside, I was screaming on the inside. When people ask what the scariest part of the experience was, they expect me to say when the building was collapsing. That wasn't it. The scary time was the period between the South Tower's collapsing and the start of the North Tower's collapsing, because it involved the anticipation that something bad was about to happen.

It was like watching a horror movie, when spooky music is playing in the background. Oh, the spooky music was playing in our minds. It was there; it was palpable. We got to the tenth floor, the ninth, the eighth, and I was thinking to myself,
Well, wow, we might make it. We may get out of here.
But, obviously, that didn't happen.

My first instinct, as soon as I heard the
boom boom boom
of the upper floors beginning to hit one another, was to get back to the stairway, to be with my men. And once I got in the stairway, things got very bad. We were being violently thrown around, debris was pelting us on every part of our bodies, and the collapse created very strong wind currents in the stairway. It was like being in an earthquake and a hurricane at the same time.

While I was being thrown around I said to myself,
Well, this is it, I can't believe this is how I'm going to die, but this is it.

It seemed like an endless amount of time, those floors coming down, closer and closer. Somebody asked me the day after the collapse, “How long did it take for the building to come down?” I said, “I don't know, maybe a couple of minutes.” And then I timed it using the news footage they ran so often in the early days: It took only thirteen seconds for the 1,368 feet of that building—110 floors and 360 feet of antenna—to fall.

Once everything stopped—the collapse stopped, the shaking stopped, the wind current stopped, the debris stopped attacking us—it was suddenly dark and still. I was coughing and spitting, trying to get all kinds of debris out of my mouth, my ears, my nose. I then wondered:
Who's still here? Who's still alive?
And once I was able to catch my breath, that's when I called out and gave a quick roll of the names of my men, and Josephine, hoping with each name that they were still alive.

Thank God, they all answered. The next thing I thought:
There has got to be a clue here, for there's got to be a way out.
I responded to a Mayday call from Mike Warchola, the lieutenant in Ladder 5 who was trapped and crushed. He ended up dying that day. But as I came back down after trying to get to him I found a service elevator shaft and [remembered] we all had the lifesaving ropes we carry. I thought,
Hey, we could rappel down this elevator shaft and maybe find the PATH train station and walk to Hoboken, New Jersey.

I thought it was a brilliant plan. But Tommy Falco, one of my guys, simply said, “Hey, pal, what if we can't get out of the shaft? It's not like we can run back up the stairs and get back here.”

Yeah
, I thought,
we'll save that for a more desperate time
. So we kept looking for a clue. Initially we tried to continue down the stairs. We felt that maybe we could work our way out, dig or climb, but we didn't go down more than half a flight when word came up from Lieutenant Jimmy McGlynn of Engine 39, who was below us with two of his firefighters trying to save Chief Prunty, who was pinned by concrete and dying a couple of floors—what there were of floors—beneath us. So there was no way out below us, we were told. We kept talking to people on the radio, hoping they would find us. I knew something eventually would happen, but what I did not know was how immense the collapse area was, and that we were the needle in the haystack.

When I finally did make it out to the ambulance I saw Chief Pete Hayden standing on top of a fire truck, directing all the operations. That was inspiring to me. After that, almost elated, I was sitting in an ambulance, getting treated, when a guy came up to me and said, “Hey, that was great, that was unbelievable, that was the most dramatic thing I ever heard on the radio. I've never heard anything like it. Congratulations. You got out.” I thanked him, and he said, “By the way, did you see Engine 4 today?”

I thought for a second about what an odd question it was, and said, “No. No, I didn't see Engine 4 today.”

And he said, “Oh, my son was working there today.”

It hit me like a ton of bricks:
Oh, my God, how many guys do I know who have sons here today?
They were here now, looking for their kids. I hadn't been out ten minutes and I got confronted with this. Then all the names started coming in. Guys were looking for their fathers, and fathers were looking for their sons, and it was just the emotional thread that came with this. And—it's still so raw.

You can read the list of men who died that day: Pete Ganci [the Fire Department's chief of department] was a great guy, a guy who accomplished so much in his life, and was a great leader. Why did he die and not me? I really don't know. People ask if I have survivor's guilt, and I say, Well, yeah, sometimes I do. Especially when I meet widows of firemen who died that day, and I can see it in their eyes, how their whole lives have been affected, as if it had been a trigger event, like a series of dominoes falling down. And how much their lives have changed, how different everything turned out for them. How hard it was, and is, for them. My own wife, Judy, assumed that I was dead, and had been trying to figure out how she was going to tell my kids, until she got word that I was alive. So I could appreciate what a bellwether event it was for these people.

To this day I continue to have little revelations of 9/11. I'll watch video of the building coming down, or I'll see photographs of it, and I'll look at it, and I think I will be able to explain it all. But I can't really tell you.