September 11, 2006 -- Five years later...

And I still remember with crystal clarity, where I was and what I was doing when I first heard about what was happening....

Five years ago, I was a second year resident on the eleventh day of my general surgery rotation and I was dog tired.

Five years ago, I was up at 4:30am CDT and at the hospital starting rounds at 5:30 am. My partner-in-crime Leila (fellow 2nd year on the same rotation) hadn't gotten there yet. The day before we'd split the patient list and I took the NICU with 18 or so babies all with surgical issues to manage. Leila took the rest of the hospital but only had about 12 or so to see, so she was coming a bit later.

Five years ago at 7:45am CDT, I was standing in the NICU, at the bedside of baby #14, who was on a ventilator, had drains & lines coming out of more places than you can imagine, and I was trying to calculate how much fluid had been pumped in and if his kidneys had made enough urine to keep the fluid balance even.

Five years ago at 7:50am CDT, my pager went off with some weird extension someplace on the 4th floor. Wasn't a known number so I didn't just drop everything to answer the page.

Five years ago at 7:55am CDT, I called the extension, since I'd gotten another page to the same weird number, and it was Leila. Her voice was not right, and it took a few repetitions of what she was saying before I got the point that I needed to get up to the 4th floor STAT. Didn't know why, but since it was a post-op floor, I thought she wanted help with a kid who was about to code. Since the gulf coast has hurricanes, the NICU was on the 3rd floor & shared the floor with the generators. So there was not stair access from 3 to 4. I had to wait for the elevators and the entire time I had my ears peeled waiting for the "Code Call" over the PA. The adrenaline was starting to pound and no matter how fast I said "Hail Mary's" the elevator took forever to go up one floor.

Five years ago at 8:00am CDT, I found Leila in an empty patient room on the 4th floor, staring at a TV watching the replay video of the first plane hitting the first tower and that tower collapsing.

Five years ago at 8:03am CDT, Leila and I watched the second tower go down. Stunned, shocked, horrified, scared, and already on adrenaline overload, all I could do was think of my family. This was the second of the 5 occasions that I've just dropped everything at work to focus on my family. Called Michael to make sure he had a TV on and knew what was happening. He did and his worksite was already starting disaster drills, not knowing what was happening. Called my Mom since I was sick with fear that my Dad was traveling and possibly on the East Coast for work. He wasn't; he was at his usual office. But Mom hadn't put the TV on yet. Called my brother, and the military base he was on was going to high alert as we spoke. So my core family was OK and I got back to work.

My residency hospital was in a military town so there were some pretty fast reactions. The CEO of our hospital had been at a conference and was trapped in Houston since all flights were grounded. He'd called in and by 8:30am our hospital was in disaster mode. All non-essential surgeries were cancelled. That lightened up the load of paperwork for Leila & I, since we didn't end up being in pre-op doing tons of last minute history & physicals. The residents on duty at that time were informed that we wouldn't be going home until we were dismissed. Made me glad I was keeping a call bag in the car every day instead of just for call nights.

By about 9:20am CDT Leila and I had mostly finished seeing all the kids on the surgery service. We were busy discharging everyone who could go home, so that we could clear beds if they were needed. We'd actually decided that now was a good time to take a break and grab breakfast before the cafeteria closed at 9:30am. And that's where our two surgeons found us, and our day went into a tail-spin.

A little background: this children's hospital was the tertiary care center for a 33 county area in South Texas that covered 31,000 square miles of territory. It was not unusual to have families that would travel 3 hours to get to us, rather than see the local E.R. It also wasn't unusual for us to "inherit" bizarre, strange, indescribable patients from the valley and from Northern Mexico. And when this happened, it usually involved a crisis of some sort and always involved a very sick kid, usually hovering on the verge of death. So we had a crackerjack transport team. They could do ambulance, fixed wing aircraft, helicopter, small jet. You name it, they'd take it, to go get a kid. As a matter of pride they would go to extraordinary measures to try to make sure the kid was in the same shape or slightly better by the time they arrived.

So I was in mid-bacon & egg sandwich when Dr. S found us to let us know we had a sick, sick kid in the Valley whom we'd suddenly been given responsibility for. He was in end-stage kidney failure, dialysis was failing, and of all times, he had a donor kidney become available. Only problem was, he was over 150 miles away, and his kidney was another 75 miles north in San Antonio. The surgeons in San Antonio, couldn't get to the valley because all flights were grounded, so they'd called us, since we were closer, to see if we could help get the kid to San Antonio. And by-the-way, the clock for that new kidney, had started counting down about an hour ago. So we only had about 8 hours at best, 12 hours at most to try to work a miracle.

I'd like to think that I had some heroic role to play at this point. The reality of it was, I was so low on the totem pole that I wasn't going to accomplish anything directly for this kid. Instead, Leila & I did the only thing that we could do, and that was we took over everything we could on the surgery service that day. Between the two of us, we became the pediatric surgeons. We tried to run interference to give Dr. S and Dr. H the time to help that kid. We carried their pagers, answered all their calls, did consults and saw patients for them. Eventually, Dr. H and Dr. S managed to work their way through the local chain of command at the nearby Air Force Base and got through to a compassionate commanding officer.

So long story short, they made arrangements for our transport jet, to fly accompanied by armed fighters down to the valley. The plan was to pick up this kid, fly to a base in San Antonio, where ground transport would take him to the surgeons there, and then our jet would fly home accompanied by the fighters still. Our transport team and pilot were advised in no uncertain terms that if they veered off the flight plan by more than a degree, they would be shot down. No questions asked. Dr. S. ended up being the medical control doctor for the flight and was in radio contact with the team almost the entire time. The kid made the trip ok to San Antonio and got there before the 12 hour mark. I never did learn if his kidney transplant succeeded or not.

And on the homeward bound leg, the transport team was able to radio back. Even though they were scared the entire time by the armed guns pointed at them, they had successfully completed their mission on a day, at a time, when all the other planes in the country were grounded.

So on a day that was overflowing with tragedy, that was my small, local miracle....

edited 09-12-06 at 8:28am -- I have been trying to post this entry since late last night. I had a photograph I took on Sept 11, 2006 that I wanted to add to this entry. I kid you not, I have tried to upload that photo 2 dozen times without success. In the interest of getting this posted I'll forgo the photo for now. This experience however is just adding to my frustration with blogger.... Stay tuned, the channel may be changing....