9/11 Twenty-Five Years Later: A Physician’s Primal Need to Help

By: Preminger

Twenty-five years ago, on September 11, 2001, I woke up for what was supposed to be an important day in my medical education. It was my first day of my OB/GYN rotation. Like most medical students, I was eager to be useful. We spend the early years of medical school absorbing enormous amounts of information, waiting for the moment when that knowledge can finally be put to use. We learn how to recognize disease, how to respond to emergencies, how to help people when something has gone terribly wrong. That morning, something went terribly wrong.

Eager to help, I soon found myself as part of a trauma team in the ER at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell, preparing for what we assumed would be an overwhelming influx of injured patients from downtown. We waited. Doctors waited. Nurses waited. Medical students waited. Supplies were readied. Beds were prepared. Everyone wanted to do something. But the patients we expected never came. That may be one of my most enduring memories of September 11, not the chaos, but the waiting, and the quiet.

Eventually, I was told that I wasn’t needed in the ER. So I tried to donate blood. I thought that was surely something I could do. But when I got to the blood bank, I was turned away there too. They had more donors than they could accommodate.

I remember the strange frustration of it. I was a medical student, in a hospital, in the middle of the greatest catastrophe our city had ever experienced, and there was absolutely nothing useful for me to do. Twenty-five years later, I understand that feeling differently. Doctors are not particularly good at helplessness. Our entire training is built around action, especially in surgery. A patient has a problem, and we make a diagnosis. There is bleeding, and we stop it. There is a wound, and we close it. Something is broken, and we try to repair it.

Plastic surgery may embody that instinct more visibly than many specialties. Much of what we do is literally fixing/repair. We take something damaged by cancer, trauma, burns, congenital differences, and try to restore it. Even in cosmetic surgery, patients come to us because there is something they would like to change, and we are trained to formulate a plan for changing it. There is enormous comfort in being able to do something.

September 11 taught me, very early in my medical career, that there would also be moments when there was nothing I could do. There was actually only one patient treated in the Cornell ER that day, a plastic surgeon who had tried to go to the site of the Towers to help. The empty stretchers at the hospital told a terrible story. We had prepared for injured survivors. There simply weren’t enough of them. That lesson has followed me throughout my career.

There have been patients I could not help. Diagnoses surgery could not fix. Families for whom medicine had run out of answers. There have been times when the most sophisticated training, the best technology, and the most experienced hands could not produce the outcome everyone desperately wanted. Those moments are difficult for doctors because they challenge something fundamental in us. We are accustomed to being the person who has a plan. But medicine eventually teaches you that helping and fixing are not always the same thing.

Sometimes helping means operating. Sometimes it means treating a wound or reconstructing what has been lost. But sometimes it means sitting beside someone when there is no operation to offer. Sometimes it means listening. Sometimes it means acknowledging that you do not have the answer. And sometimes it means simply being present in a moment you cannot change.

I did not understand that on September 11, 2001. I was a young medical student who desperately wanted an assignment. I wanted someone to tell me where to go, what to carry, whom to treat. I wanted to be helpful, to fix someone. When the ER didn’t need me, I went to the blood bank. When the blood bank didn’t need me either, I felt useless.

Today, I see something else in that memory. Thousands of New Yorkers were doing exactly the same thing. They lined up to give blood. They brought food. They searched for ways to volunteer. Doctors and nurses stood ready in hospitals throughout the city. People opened their homes, their businesses, and their hearts to strangers. So much of what was offered that day was never needed in the way we expected it to be. But the human impulse mattered.

Twenty-five years later, I still think about that medical student standing in a hospital wanting desperately to help. I could not fix anything that day. None of us could undo what had happened. Perhaps one of the hardest lessons in medicine, and in life, is accepting the limits of what our hands can accomplish while never losing the instinct to extend them, an especially important message before Yom Kippur.

On September 11, 2001, there was very little I could do. Twenty-five years later, I realize that becoming a doctor has not meant eliminating that feeling of helplessness. It has meant learning how to live with it, how to recognize the limits of what I can fix, but to still always show up ready to help.

Gmar chatimah tovah. 

At Preminger Plastic Surgery, we are committed to educating our patients and providing personalized care tailored to their unique needs. For those considering plastic surgery, we offer guidance every step of the way to help you achieve your aesthetic and wellness goals. Dr. Preminger is a board-certified plastic surgeon with degrees from Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia.

For more information or to schedule a consultation, please visit premingermd.com or call 212-706-1900. Follow us on Instagram @premingerplasticsurgery.