On September 11, 2001, Kristina Jones was three months into her job as an attending psychiatrist at St. Vincent’s, the closest hospital to the World Trade Center. She worked 13 hours that harrowing day. The next day she wrote for seven hours, trying to record what she had seen before it evaporated from her mind. Then she put away her recollections, confiding in only a few close friends about them, because her experiences felt small compared with people who had lost lives, family members, or friends.
Twenty-five years later, Dr. Jones decided that she wanted to share what she wrote about St. Vincent’s. Her words are a time capsule of September 11, and a remembrance of those whose lives were lost.
—The Editors
Everything in Manhattan below 14th Street is closed to civilians. No traffic, no bread, no newspapers. Only military planes and helicopters fly overhead. It is 5 a.m. My 13-hour shift yesterday at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village keeps replaying in my mind, and I need you to know what happened.
When I had almost arrived to work, everyone I saw was staring at the World Trade Center. “A plane just hit one of the Twin Towers,” someone said, and smoke darker than black ink streamed from the building. That’s when I began to shake. I realized that my dear friend Brian might be in there. I ran back to my apartment—cell phones didn’t work—and emailed him: “EMERGENCY are you OK?”
Then I went to the hospital, grabbed and put on a white coat, and reported for duty. When I signed in, every nurse, doctor, and emergency medical services worker was there, many of them from hospitals far away. We didn’t know whether 200 or 2,000 people would be coming in the next hour. The psychiatry plan was that anyone screaming or freaking out from the stress should be pulled out of the emergency department.
Three psychiatrists rushed toward a woman who was screaming, then crying, then screaming in the hallway. “My skin is burning! I have to get out of the building! The building is falling!” she kept saying. There was no time to register people as they arrived. But the giddiness of being freed of administrative duties turned to fright as I pictured waves of people arriving at St. Vincent’s, and we discussed how many beds we could make available on different floors of the hospital. When I walked outside toward my office in another building, there was only a cloud of smoke where one of the Twin Towers used to be. I kept looking for the building, and it kept not being there.
Read more
