Weekends at Bellevue

by Julie Holland

  It’s not until Wednesday afternoon that I finally reach Daniel, who tells me that things are under control. They were prepared for five thousand casualties and evacuated most of the CPEP and the AES. They emergently discharged as many patients as possible from the inpatient wards, making space for surgery patients and burn victims. Stretchers were lined up on every wall, in the lobbies, and in the parking lots, but they only got something like two hundred patients all day. He is describing what I already know to be true. I have seen the empty stretchers on the television for the past two days. The wounded simply didn’t arrive.

  “We’re fine here. Just come in this weekend,” he tells me. I imagine he wants to run the show on his own; he wants the glory, the martyrdom. Well, this is one big, juicy steak he won’t have to share, I think to myself. Of course, these malevolent thoughts are childish and irrational, triggered by all of my resentments toward Daniel, but the truth is, I’m relieved to be off the hook. I don’t want to leave my family and our safe haven just yet. He is working—as I should be—and I’m more comfortable resenting him for it than feeling inadequate and guilty.

  Tuesday and Wednesday, September 11 and 12, we have the most spectacularly beautiful weather at the house. I go kayaking and running. I sit on the grass with Molly and marvel at the warm wind, the stark blue sky with no airplanes, and the sparkling sunshine. Wednesday morning I bring home the New York Times from the A&P. The pictures are poignant and nauseating. I remain fixated on the horror of people in business suits jumping to their deaths. Those images are burned into my brain. Later, research on the people who witnessed the disaster will reveal that those who watched the bodies fall are the ones with the most severe symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

  We speak to Jeremy’s sisters, one of whom lives in SoHo and is having to deal with constant sirens, National Guard blockades, and acrid smoke and fumes. We beg her to come up to the house, and eventually she takes the train with her husband and two kids. We spend the rest of the week hiking in the woods and eating big meals. The television is always on in the background. Rudy Giuliani has become “America’s Mayor.” It is his finest hour, and he is lucky. His term is coming to a close, and he was going to go out with a whimper, but the World Trade attacks are allowing him to go out with a bang, a hero by proxy.

  Saturday night rolls around and we drive back into the city, no problem. I get Jeremy and Molly settled in the apartment before I take off for work. I park in the back lot, behind the hospital, which is now full of government vehicles. There are official-looking cars parked on every available surface behind the hospital, on the curbs, on the grass, everywhere. There is also a huge red, white, and blue school bus. One of the hospital policemen calls over to me, “Hey! You wanna meet Mike Piazza?” A bunch of the Mets and Yankees have come to Bellevue to visit the patients who are 9/11-related. I take a pass on Piazza, waving and smiling graciously.

  I am eager to get into the hospital, curious if the CPEP will be busy or not, but it is unusually quiet—a ghost town in a ghost city. I take sign-out and learn we have only five people in the area, a ridiculously small number for CPEP. I can’t imagine why, the weekend after the towers collapsed, we would have such a low census. The calm after the storm?

  I see one interesting case, a man from Iowa, in the middle of a manic episode, who felt that he needed to be at “ground hero” to assist the excavation. He took a bus across the country, went straight to the financial district, and got pulled out of a restricted area where he had commandeered a backhoe.

  “They needed my help,” he explains to me.

  After I do his admission paperwork, I go for a walk to find the Wall of Prayer out front; I’ve been seeing it on television all week, and I want a look for myself. As I pass through the AES triage area, I see cases of water bottles and boxes of food on the stretchers. There are fresh fruit, chips, sodas, and tons of brown bags filled with sandwiches, snacks, and juice boxes. “You Are A Hero!” is written on one bag. “God Bless You! God Bless America!” is written on another. No hero, I nevertheless grab an apple and head for the front entrance.

  A navy blue billboard has surrounded the old parking garage for the past few months while some construction was going on; it is now covered with laminated posters. Each poster, in large handwritten letters, says “MISSING” across the top. They all have pictures of World Trade Center employees, or Port Authority police officers, or firefighters, EMS, or NYPD. Every one of these pictures features a missing person who is not just smiling, but beaming. They are holding balloons, celebrating their child’s birthday or christening, or dressed to the nines for their prom or wedding. They are on their honeymoons in front of sunsets on beaches; they’re holding new babies. One of the close-ups is of an older man with two small hands, one on either side of his face. Below it is the wide-angle shot, with his grandson on his shoulders, leaning over his head and nestling his cheeks.

  “The missing” are of every race and age. They have birthmarks, piercings, and tattoos—we know because they are carefully enumerated as identifiers on the flyers—along with which floor of which tower they were last seen or heard from. The wall is covered with these posters, and on the ground below them are rows of candles and mounds of flowers lining the entire periphery of the blue billboards. People are loitering around the Wall of Prayer, and there are several television crews with bright lights and bulky cameras. Some Bellevue staff are waiting in line to talk to the reporters, and those still hoping to find lost loved ones are being interviewed as well.

  I make my way up First Avenue, over to the city medical examiner’s office next door, where they’ve set up a huge outdoor makeshift morgue. Electric generators are running enormous stacks of lights, spaced along the cross street between First Avenue and the FDR expressway. It’s ten o’clock at night, but it is bright white in the alley between Bellevue and the medical examiner’s office, and everywhere there are empty stretchers. Hundreds of people in police uniforms or disposable scrubs are milling about. The process of sifting through the remains, transported to the ME site in refrigerated trucks, has begun. But they must be between deliveries, because no one is working. The Red Cross and Salvation Army have set up comfort stations for the workers, and there is food everywhere. Granola bars and cereal bars being promoted by General Mills or Kellogg’s are stacked up in boxes. There are bags of ice, cases of spring water, and hundreds of doughnuts. There are shelters all over the city that could make good use of these handouts, and I hope they will at least get the leftovers in a day or two.

  Entering the hospital through the ambulance bay, I make my way back to CPEP again, but they have little need for me tonight. And then who should appear but Mary Ann DeLeo? I haven’t seen her since she wrapped up filming the HBO Bellevue documentary.

  “Hey, Julie!” she says, giving me a hug. “You want to help me find the fire marshal?” Somehow, she has set up a session to perform Reiki on him. I knew she was into yoga, but I didn’t realize she knew how to perform this special massage, which I think of as a “psychic rubdown.” She needs to meet him at the morgue, and she wants me to take her there. Mary Ann and I head out the back exit of the hospital.

  There is another Wall of Prayer, this one behind the hospital, and it is for NYPD, NYFD, and EMS workers specifically. It starts to sink in a little more what has been going on these past five days that I have been out of the city. I start to think about all the EMS workers I know, the cops I’ve met over the years, and then I remember the Port Authority police. They bring us patients too, from the bus terminal, and it occurs to me how much they’re just like the hospital police I hang out with every weekend. I worry about how many kids lost their parents this week, and that gets me worrying about the ultimate pain, losing Molly. It’s a trip my mind will take again and again in the coming months, until I can train it not to go down that path.

  Mary Ann and I walk right through the elaborate, two-tiered security system the state police have set up around the medical examiner’s ten
t. The second pair of cops must have figured the first ones had already done their job, but we slipped right by the first pair easily.

  “We must look like pathologists,” I say to Mary Ann.

  Everyone is just hanging around, eating the free snacks, hovering over the still-empty stretchers.

  Mary Ann tells a receptionist in the ME building that she is there to see the fire marshal. In a few minutes, he ambles down the stairs with a colleague. These guys haven’t slept in days, and it shows. They’ve lost scores of men; whole firehouses have been wiped out, and these two look pretty fried. I have offered Mary Ann the use of my office with its queen-sized bed to work her magic. No one will be disturbed there. When I finally go to bed some time after midnight, Mary Ann is finishing up with the second guy. He says he feels amazing. He can’t quite understand what she’s just done, but he’s recharged and ready to go back to work, and he looks a lot better. I climb into my bed, where the fire marshal got just his aura tuned up, and I don’t know quite what to think about my night. It takes me a lot longer to fall asleep than usual. I keep picturing the empty stretchers beneath the powerful lights, matching the faces from the flyers with the missing bodies.

  On Monday morning, I’m done with my slow weekend and I decide to get my nails done. I haven’t had a manicure in months, and my cuticles are bitten raw. Just like with the patients, I can always tell how I’m doing by looking at my nails. I’m not doing too great.

  On the way into the salon, I stare at the headlines on the news rack outside the door. The Daily News front page has a grid of photos, maybe fifteen by fifteen, faces of police officers, firefighters, and ambulance drivers who are now dead. I think of all the wives who’ve lost their husbands, the children aching for their fathers. When the manicurist begins to rub my hands, massaging in the lotion, I start to cry and find that I can’t stop. I put my head down so she won’t see, but she does.

  “What happen? You have fight with boyfriend?” she asks kindly.

  I can’t answer right away, just shaking my head as the tears fall down my cheeks. “They’re all dead,” I choke out.

  “Oh … yes. Many dead, yes.”

  I am nearly a week late in my mourning and she is caught off balance, back to business as usual, assuming I’m upset about a romance gone awry. It is only when I am being pampered, massaged, and taken care of for a moment that I finally let my guard down enough to feel the pain of what has happened, the dismay at the destruction, the horror, the lives taken, the lives forever altered.

  I am having a delayed reaction because, quite simply, I was out of town. It was a unifying event for all who were there that Tuesday, the Pearl Harbor for our generation. The city huddled together, under an attack now central to our history and culture. I am feeling like an outsider in my own city. I hate that I wasn’t there to help, to comfort the refugees, the wounded, and the grieving.

  When we have our next faculty meeting, I apologize to my colleagues, feeling the gulf between us.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here. I called Daniel and he said not to come in….” I trail off. What is unspoken is that his words were enough for me. I know that other people wouldn’t have called; they would’ve just shown up. Even Maxwell, who worked Monday night, came back in on Tuesday morning, explaining to me, “I just couldn’t stay away.” Like the man from Iowa with the backhoe, he felt he was needed.

  The bomb goes off and initially we all scatter, fearing for our lives, but then some of us race back to ground zero to help in whatever way we can. There’s a reason they were calling it “ground hero.” I used to be one of those people.

  Maxwell couldn’t stay away, but I did, slipping into my role as mother and caretaker, not warrior, savior. What I couldn’t fully communicate beyond my weakly conveyed regret and guilt at the staff meeting, was that although I was sheltered from harm, on some level I felt that I was cheated out of something potent and defining by not being in the city on 9/11. The world would forever be divided into before that sunny Tuesday morning, and after.

  I didn’t realize then that the psychic fallout would last for years. I would have a chance to help clean up after all.

  Don’t Let Me Down

  It is Sunday morning, two months after 9/11, just before sign-out. I’m reviewing and signing charts from the night before, and taking orders for a coffee-shop run.

  “EMS is here,” yells lovely Rita from inside her glassed-in cage. I go to see what they’ve brought me, and more important, which EMS workers have come. Since 9/11, every time EMS walks in, I am eager to see which of my pals is still in the game. I haven’t seen some of my favorites yet, and that makes me nervous about their fate.

  This time, it’s one of the gals I’ve been waiting to see. There are certain EMS workers who stand out. This one, with her glitter nail polish and dyed magenta hair is quirky, sassy. She always reminds me of my sister in LA. She looks and talks like her, and they both paint their nails outrageous colors.

  “I was wondering if you were alive!” I confess to her as I give her a bear hug. I ask her how it was, and if she was there, and she tells me this story:

  “I was with my partner. We had just dropped off someone here at Bellevue and we heard that a helicopter crashed into one of the towers, or maybe it was a private jet, no one seemed to know for sure, but all hell was breaking loose in the ambulance bay. The staff went to DEFCON 5, and started lining up stretchers, paging for extra help to come down to the ER. So my partner says, ‘You wanna go?’ and I’m like, ‘Why not? I got one more month till my pension.’ And he said, ‘You might as well go out with a bang.’

  “So we drove down toward World Trade and all these other EMS rigs were heading downtown too, but everyone on foot was walking the other way. We set up right where we did back in ‘93, when it got bombed, remember? The second plane had hit by now and it was total panic. A free-for-all.

  “After the first tower collapsed, debris was flying everywhere. The parked cars on the street were exploding. The building right next to us exploded and hot air was coming out of the lobby. I was getting thrown around by the air blasts, by the debris raining down, and then when the second tower collapsed I got hit with something on fire. My coat caught fire, and then my hair. If I had had anything like gel or mousse in my hair, I think my whole head would’ve lit up. I started running, and people were yelling at me, ‘Stop, drop, and roll!’ and I was like ‘Fuck that!’ and I just kept running. I noticed my shoelaces were on fire—not my shoes, ‘cause they’re leather—just my laces.”

  We both look down at her shoes.

  “So I got scars from the burns on my back now, and my hair’s a lot shorter, right? But I’m okay.” She shrugs as she finishes her story, as if it were a recap of something a bit less life-threatening, say a trip to the corner store.

  “Well, thank God you’re all right,” I say to her, sounding like a worried mother in a soap opera.

  “Seriously. So, I went back there a coupla weeks ago and drove to the spot where we had set the rig up, y’know? And then over to the place I ran to? I can’t believe it. I have no memory of running that far. I mean, I’m not in the best shape, right? I’m overweight, I smoke. Sixteen blocks like it was nothing.”

  I ask her how she’s feeling now, if she’s anxious or easily startled, or if she’s had any insomnia or nightmares, doing a not-so-subtle screen for post-traumatic stress disorder. “Did you lose many friends down there?” I probe.

  She gets a little teary as she counts them off on her fingers. “My best friend of ten years, on the subway, underground. A slew of EMS friends, a brother-in-law …”

  “Well, I’m just glad you’re still alive,” I tell her again. “I’ve been waiting for you to come around. I still don’t know who’s dead and who’s not. I just keep working every weekend, waiting to reconnect with all my old EMS pals, hoping they’re okay. I guess I’ll just hang here and wait until each one eventually checks back into CPEP with their crazy patients, so I can give them a hug like I ga
ve you.” I pause. “Or else I’m going to realize over time that they’ll never come my way again.”

  Our town of eight million has been traumatized, and we are all still reeling from the blow. It’s not just the city workers who are having trouble putting the pieces back together. We are all shaken. And there has been an interesting response by the medical community, an uptick in prescribing antianxiety medication and sleeping pills.

  There was a time, when I first opened my private practice in 1996, when I had to leave a few minutes at the end of the initial interview for “the talk.” I had to assure my new patient that it was okay to take psychiatric medications, that the pills were going to help. I had to sell my patients on the idea that there is no stigma to psychotropics. Those days are gone.

  My new private practice patients come to me with an agenda. Their friend, cousin, or dental hygienist is on this or that drug and they hear good things. They’ve seen the ads with the butterflies, or the smiling people on horseback. They remember particular brands from the women’s magazines, and they have a few questions. But it’s not if they should take medications, it’s only a question of which one. Nearly everyone who comes into my office is assuming they’ll leave with a prescription in hand. There is no longer any cajoling necessary.

  Yes, the psychopharmacology business is booming since 9/11. After the twin towers fell, it was as if everyone suddenly had permission to medicate themselves: businessmen who were downtown and saw the bodies fall, mothers who were across town and didn’t know where their children were, firefighters who lost their buddies. They came to my office fearful, dazed. They needed something to calm their nerves, to help them to make sense of it all, and so did everyone they knew.

  The level of ambient hyper-vigilance in NYC has never really settled back to zero. After the planes hit, there was still anthrax, Afghanistan, Iraq, and al Qaeda to deal with. No one felt safe enough, or entirely sure about the future. Xanax and Klonipin are still flying off the shelves. As more physicians prescribe these psychic pain relievers, the trend is gathering speed, reaching a critical mass. Eventually, everyone will know someone who is taking something to help them relax, or sleep, or smile.