It was a crystal clear beautiful early Autumn day. The traffic to work that day was good but very backed up heading into the city. I was working on a Deaf inpatient ward in a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey. Everyone was late that day for some reason and no one showed up to morning rounds. As I walked through the day room the patients said that a plane had somehow flown into the tower and was on fire. I remember something like that happening when I lived in LA and watched as the second plane hit. I knew immediately that this was purposeful. I wanted to protect my patients, who as inpatients were by definition unstable and had already experienced so much trauma in their lives. But I also didn’t think that shielding them from news was better.
I started interpreting the news coverage for them because close captioning went down and the regular interpreters hadn’t gotten there yet and when they did, they were a mess, like the rest of the staff. At the time my sign language was pretty good, but simple and I was able to tell them what was happening, while minimizing the drama. The patients managed better than staff. I lost it when the second tower went down and they tried to comfort me. The hospital went into lock down and I didn’t get home until late that night. I was supposed to leave the next day for a wedding in Bethesda but it was postponed because the groom couldn’t there since the planes were grounded. I sat at home watching TV and crying, not liking the change that was brewing, and thinking that perhaps Freud was right and there really is a Death Instinct – a human drive toward destruction.
Those towers were my guideposts and bearings from the time I moved to NY. I was so excited when I moved to an apartment in July of that year and I could see them from my front door.
Dr. Blue's Mid-life Musings 