New Beginnings

In the midst of the chaos and confusion, loneliness and isolation replaced communication.

“Everyone was working, working, working, but no one was talking,” Dr. Trosterman says. “When I look back on that day, I feel angry, frustrated, scared, weird....While there weren’t 1,000 people [to save], those 10 or 15 lives that were saved, that were critically ill, were unbelievably important to the doctors who were taking care of them—no one knows about that.”

The Optimist

Ten years ago, Dr. Rizk was director of a three-hospitalist HM service at Beth Israel Medical Center; now the program has 26 FTE hospitalists and 15 physician assistants on staff. She was running late to grand rounds that day, coffee in hand as she passed a television and saw the first news reports of an airplane crashing into the first tower. Moments later, the hospital activated its disaster protocol, and Dr. Rizk rounded up her hospitalists.

“We very rapidly started discharging patients,” she recalls. “I actually went up to the 11th floor of our hospital and could see at that time that the second tower had been hit. It was almost like a dream, like a horrible nightmare. We could see the skyline changing when the first tower dropped. I could hear the sirens and see the smoke that was filling the air.

“We started to create triage stations outside our ED, and we had all the physicians at the hospital available. The ED was pretty chaotic in terms of the throughput. There wasn’t clear instruction; we didn’t know what was happening. ... There was a lot of debris and scratches and fractures that came through our ED.

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The MOST Interesting Patient

Although his 9/11 was chaotic, stressful, and exhausting, Dr. Trosterman didn’t perform many miracles on survivors. Even so, he does have an interesting story to tell about Port Authority officer John McLoughlin.

“He was buried under the rubble. They found him and dug him out” on Sept. 12, says Dr. Trosterman, who was the on-call intern for trauma surgery at NYU Bellevue. “He had massive crush injuries to his leg. … He was brought into the hospital and taken to the operating room.”

The surgical team saved McLoughlin’s limbs, but he slipped into a coma. Dr. Trosterman was in charge of the post-care unit in which the officer was assigned.

“I remember being yelled at by multiple trauma surgeons, telling me what to do,” he recalls. “I had to watch this guy and make sure he didn’t die overnight. That was the most traumatic patient, but he was also the most famous, celebrated man in New York City at the time.”

McLoughlin would stay in the coma for six weeks and endure 27 additional surgeries. After about six weeks of recovery and rehab, he was discharged. Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani visited, taking pictures as he walked out of the hospital. McLoughlin’s story was portrayed in the Oliver Stone movie World Trade Center.

“His entire first night, when he was on death’s door, it was probably the only thing I actually did to save anyone during 9/11,” Dr. Trosterman says. “The only thing I really did was stay with him all night long. I did everything I could to make sure he stayed alive.

“And he did. I just paid super-close attention to him.” —JC

I remember very clearly standing outside of the ED as well, mostly greeting families who were looking for loved ones throughout the course of the day and collecting photographs that we posted on the wall for missing loved ones. And I remember these chilling feelings; there were so few people that were coming in that were in critical condition. I knew that this was not where they would find these patients.”