911 Victims' Compensation Fund

RoseC said:

Wow - that's interesting

Wow - that's interesting LaCh. Were you living there in 2001?

I'm a native NYer, born here and have lived here all my life. I was standing at the feet of the WTC during the attacks, saw the whole thing, and attended school 3 blocks from the site for the next 2 years.  There's no doubt that there was god knows what down there for a very long time afterwards; you could see it, (the dust) smell it and feel it. Anal SCC was included in the 911 Victims Compensation fund of covered conditions in 2013.  My (pre-existing) asthma also took a bad turn from 911.  (just an aside; the VCF doesn't care if you have other risik factors for whatever cancer you get. If your cancer is included in their list of covered cancers, the presence or absence of known risk factors doesn't matter for thier purposes. Insofar as the only other recognized risk factor for Anal ACC, that of HPV, I was negative at time of diagnosis and have tested negative at other times in my life. There's no evidence that I've ever had HPV.  But I was down at the WTC during the attacks and for two years after.

Ouch_Ouch_Ouch said:

We can't outrun the environment.

The reassurances that the air was safe always strained credulity. (Ignore those billowing black clouds and blizzards of dust behind the curtain!)

A person from my yoga class, Berry Berenson, the wife of Anthony Perkins, was on one of the 'planes. (I spent the summer that year in Wellfleet, MA on Cape Cod, where she lived.) My husband was scheduled to deliver custom wood panels to a new Carlton Hotel that morning in the block south of the WTC, but spotted a flaw in one of them. By the time it was stripped and repaired, the attack was underway and the Manhattan was closed. (I don't see a Carlton there now, but the World Center Hotel looks like it's on the same spot.)

When the hotel was able to resume work, the project manager took Buddy out on one of the high balconies for a panorama of the devastation. He told me that it was a far more terrible scene than any you could ever see on a television screen. There was also at least 3 inches of dust and debris on the balconies and snowdrifts of it had seeped around the doors and windows.

Buddy's experiences and mine were removed from the events; I cannot imagine actually being there when those 'planes hit.

It was a difficult day, difficult weeks, difficult months and remains a difficult thing, not to a great degree, but to some degree.  Because I just  got the ball rolling on the 911 victims compensation fund thing, the topic has come to the fore and I was telling a friend about my experience of the event. To help him better understand how close I was, I sent him a map (via email) of where I was standing marked on it. When I looked at it myself, I had to stop and really take it in. The reason the first plane flew over my head was because I had just crossed Greenwich street on Chambers. Greenwich leads (or led) directly to the first tower hit, and it passed over my head just as I stepped onto the sidewalk.  (The video that plays incessantly, over and over was captured by a guy directly behind me, over my right shoulder, so that's where I was and that's what I saw for the first strike. What the video doesn't capture are the sirens tearing to the tower, the helicopter above it (all within no more than a minute or two of the impact) and the millions of papers floating upwards. It doesn't capture how every person stopped. Time stopped. It was like something out of the Twilight Zone where everything just stops, except for the sirens of the first responders and the fire trucks and ambulances and cop cars tearing to the buildings, and to their deaths. We all just stopped and gaped at it. Most of us saw the plane fly into the tower because the sound of the plane was so strange  and we reflexively looked up in time to see it go in. Many weeks later I found out that the plane sounded so odd because the pilot opened the throttle to increase the force of the impact. It sounded like a  plane waiting to taxi down a runway. Someone behind me said the words terrorist attack, but I wasn't convinced. Because commercial jets never fly over Manhattan in that that way, at that altitide, and because of the sound, I thought that maybe the pilot had had engine trouble.  The second inpact was different, because while the first went straight into the building, the second hit at an oblique angle. The first just disappeared into the building, the fires started immediately, the smoke went from black to white and back to black. But the second knocked huge pieces of the tower off, I felt the percussion of the impact and the heat from the fireball.  Instead of everybody stopping, everybody ran, as it happens, towards where I was standing.  Someone behind me pulled me by the shoulder and said, "we have to get out of here;" I don't know who he was because I never looked. Pieces of the building were falling, crowds of people were stampeding; he was right, it was time to leave. Strangely, I wasn't scared, just sort of numb, taking it all in. Fear wasn't what I felt. Shock and then numbness was what I felt. In any case, on one hand, one is never prepared to witness such a thing. On the other hand, I'd had recurring dreams since early childhood that finally tapered off and stopped when I was in my late thirties. So I had some sort of precognitive dreams of exactly what I witnessed for over 30 years, and that was something that (for a while) I grappled with.  That aspect of it no longer troubles me because in reality, those sorts of things happen to me often. This was a bigger event, but that was the only thing that set it apart from other, similar experiences that I have. In any case, I try to forget the day, as much as one can, and if NYC would just cooperate and not resurrect the event every year, I might actually succeed.  Not for love nor money would I go into the Museum; it's basically a multi media recreation, resurrection, and intentional re-living of that day, and I have absolutely no interest in doing that. But I have to meet with the lawyer in a few weeks regarding the fund thing, and if it's not too cold and I'm not too tired, I might take a walk over to the memorial. It's very close to the lawyer's office and I would like to see that.  There's actually more strangeness to the story, but I've probably gone on too long as it is.  But yeah, the dust was everywhere for a long time, and the stench persisted for, literally, months. A week after the attacks, I went back down to see what was what with school and classes. It was locked so I wandered over to the site, or as close as one could get, which was close enough to see the pile of rubble and just stuff everywhere. Everyone was in shock; everyone, literally was like the walking dead, cops, fire, people, everyone. The buildings were still burning. I asked a cop what the smell was. He just looked at me and said, "The bodies inside are still burning." So... that was 9/11.  Also my birthday. I guess if you live long enough, you accumulate stories, some worthy of telling, some worthy of forgetting, and some which are a combination of both. 

pializ said:

LaCh

For anyone you know suffering from post traumatic stress disorder as a result of 9/11, EMDR is a valuable therapy. I cannot begin to imagine what you have experienced, & the forthcoming meeting will undoubtedly resurrect emotions you were unaware of. They tend to catch us that way. if bothersome, please consider the above.

Liz

 

Well, I'm actually well-aware of the triggers, since there are plenty here for the anniversary every year. My strategy is to avoid them. No tv, no papers, no radio for the week or so beforehand. I try to get out of the city for my birthday. I wouldn't say that I have PTSD (although  did for about a year afterward). I would say, though, that it's changed the way that I think, and the way that I respond.  Without any accompanying anxiety (I'm not a particulary anxious person in general) I do tend to plan an escape route in large crowds, regardless of the unlikely need for one and accept the fact that if there's a chemical attack on the subway, there's nothing I can do about it. I'm don't like (but don't feel anxious) when planes fly overhead in ways that don't "seem  right" to me (too low, too loud, too far off usual flight paths) and was extremely pissed off a few years ago when the city had the Blue Angels do a fly-around of Manhattan without announcing it. I wasn't the only one, and the city apologized and issued a mea culpa. I never watch disaster movies because I know that whatever you think can't possibly happen, can.  Despite my experience of what happened in the area, I find that lower Manhattan, from the Brooklyn Bridge and south has a really "good energy."  I like it. I've been there a several times since and really, (and the reason that I had the exposure that I did) I attended school two streets over from ground zero for 2 years afterward. So it's not like I've never been back. I promised a friend in Spain that I'd take pictures of the memorial for him, assuming that I go. I have the appt next week, but it's supposed to rain, so we'll see.  I'm a wimp in the cold. To be honest, that's the biggest issue for me going down there; the cold. We'll see how I feel when I'm standing at the memorial.