Post by bingbong on Sept 10, 2008 9:28:26 GMT 12
7 Years Later, 9/11 Survivors Search for Normalcy
www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/nyregion/10injured.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all
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By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
Published: September 9, 2008
Lauren Manning’s handshake is strong, almost bionic. You might think it was a byproduct of decades of playing tennis and golf. But her grip has been painfully relearned, and bolstered with more titanium pins than she cares to count.
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James Estrin/The New York Times
Elaine Duch worked at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on the 88th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
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Surviving 9/11, but Not ForgettingAudio Slide Show
Surviving 9/11, but Not Forgetting
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Times Topics: Sept. 11, 2001
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James Estrin/The New York Times
Elaine Duch was injured in the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center.
On a hot summer day, she wore flirtatiously high-heeled sandals, creased white trousers and a long-sleeved blue blouse, leaving only feet and hands exposed. So much of her skin is still stippled with scars. “My tattoos,” she said with a rueful smile, as though they were an indelible remnant of a carefree youth. Only in her case, she noted, they cannot be “lasered off.”
On Sept. 11, 2001, Mrs. Manning — newly married, the mother of a 10-month-old boy, at the top of her profession on Wall Street — was met by a fireball as she strode into the lobby of the World Trade Center. On a day that New York City hospitals waited to be overwhelmed by casualties, only to realize that most people either perished in the collapse of the Twin Towers or streamed out into the holocaust of ashes largely intact, she was among the oft-forgotten few who were severely injured yet survived.
In the face of 3,000 dead, it was easy to overlook the relative handful like Mrs. Manning, who was burned over 80 percent of her body and spent weeks on the brink of death, then months at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. If the nation’s worst terrorist attack is fading in many memories as its seventh anniversary approaches, it remains an everyday reality for these victims, etched in their changed appearance, their constant pain, their consciousness that they are both deeply lucky and unfathoScably unlucky.
Mrs. Manning, 47, whose plight became public when the e-mail updates that her husband, Greg, sent to family and friends turned into a bestselling book, has returned to some semblance of her old life. But there are still so many things she cannot do.
She cannot walk her terrier, Caleigh, who weighs just 29 pounds but “pulls a lot,” or cook a full meal because the smallest nick in her delicately healed skin risks infection. She could not apply the glitter or fasten the hooks during a snowflake-making session in her son’s first-grade class.
“Through the grace of the people in my life, I am able to conduct what appears at first glance in many ways more normal than it is beneath the surface,” Mrs. Manning said recently. “My husband, he’s been my hands.”
A Long Road
There is no clear accounting of how many people were seriously injured that day. Of the $7 billion distributed by the federal government’s September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, $6 billion went to the families of those killed at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and in the plane that went down in Pennsylvania; $1 billion went to the injured. Most of the injured were firefighters, and most of the payments were for respiratory ailments.
Burns accounted for 40 of the 2,680 injury payments.
Eighteen of the most gravely burned were taken that day to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. A dozen of those survived.
Some, like Mrs. Manning and Harry Waizer, who both worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, have regained a sense of equilibrium. For others, like Elaine Duch, who was a senior administrative assistant in the real estate department at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the before and after are clearly demarcated.
Ms. Duch, 56, has cut herself off from her old friends, partly because, as she put it, “I’m never going to be the Elaine that I used to be.” Of her current friends, Ms. Duch said, “Well, see, they did not know me before, they only know me as an injured person.”
Nowadays, she goes to the New Jersey Shore with her twin sister and a woman who saw her on the news and who sent her cards and letters every day of the five months she spent in rehabilitation. She no longer drives because her hands are too weak and she is easily rattled. She avoids zippers, tiny buttons and opening the wax paper in cereal boxes. She suffers through summers and winters because her burned skin does not tolerate heat and cold very well.
“I felt like I was young when this happened, and I feel like I’m old now,” Ms. Duch said. “I feel like my past life was a different life.”
Since she can no longer work, in her mind’s eye her professional self still haunts the upper reaches of the North Tower, where she was standing in a hallway when the flames came; she managed to get down, only to be given last rites as she emerged from the building. “I’m still stuck at the 88th floor,” she says. “That’s my office.”
Her days now are filled mainly with physical therapy and psychotherapy. She has taken up painting, in what she says is a search for inner beauty. She sold her house and bought a condo in Bayonne, N.J. She changed her hair color from blond to black.
“I am happy to celebrate every birthday,” Ms. Duch said. “I am never, ever going to be the Elaine that I used to be, but I could have been dead at 49.”
Unlike Ms. Duch, Mr. Waizer is back working as a tax lawyer in Cantor Fitzgerald’s new Midtown Manhattan headquarters. Because of his injuries, he has reduced stamina and responsibilities; he no longer is the head of the tax department but, he said, he never cared much for titles.
“When you are in the hospital for as long as I was and at home for as long as I was, you think about what it is that you want to do with your life,” said Mr. Waizer, 57, who spent about two and a half years recovering from his burns before returning to work. “I realized after a time that while I still had that question, and like most people I always will have some of that question remaining, I liked what I did.”
In testimony before the 9/11 Commission on its first day of hearings in 2003, Mr. Waizer recounted how he had been going up to his office on the 104th floor when he felt an explosion and the elevator began to plummet. Burned as he beat out the flames, Mr. Waizer got out on the 78th floor and took the stairs to the ground, seeing looks of horror and sympathy on the faces of those who let him pass.
He was given a 5 percent chance of survival. Despite back pain, scarring and nerve damage, he has regained a sense of physical normalcy, though with gentle wit, he draws a line between his recovery and Ms. Manning’s, saying, “I was never as pretty as she was.”
Perhaps the most distinctive relic of his injuries is his whispery, soothing voice, possibly caused by inhaling jet fuel that left him with “a bit of vocal cord paralysis.”
Mr. Waizer, who lives in Edgemont, in Westchester County, and has three children ages 17, 19 and 20, said his 9/11 experience has strengthened his ties to his wife, Karen, and sharpened his moral compass. “It’s more important for me to be a good person,” Mr. Waizer said.
After the Nightmares
“Love, Greg & Lauren” is a chronicle of the three months after the terrorist attacks, as seen from Lauren Manning’s bedside. Greg Manning, who at the time was a senior vice president at Euro Brokers, in the south tower — but who was home that morning with the baby — sent daily e-mail messages to loved ones describing his efforts to connect to his comatose wife through music and poetry and baseball.
The intimate diary then details the critical moments of Mrs. Manning’s recovery as she regained consciousness — her first words were “Hi, Greg,” on Nov. 12 — and slowly began to understand what had happened. It ends in mid-December 2001, when Mrs. Manning left the hospital for a rehabilitation center. The couple agreed to talk about their lives since then, in a sort of sequel, though they asked to meet at the Midtown headquarters of Random House, the book’s publisher, rather than their home.
Mrs. Manning burst into the glass-walled conference room a half-step ahead of her husband, smiling and thrusting out one of the hands that had been so badly burned when she pushed the lobby doors open to escape.
She spent the first month in a medically induced coma having visions, she said, of falling through space into a frightening arctic darkness, nearly missing being speared on stalagmites, only to be saved repeatedly at the last minute by landing on a ledge.
Now the nightmares have receded.
“I sleep well,” Mrs. Manning said. “My dreams are of what I need to do in the future.”
She is as tiny as a sparrow. Her face is subtly different from the photograph on the book jacket, as if reflected in an ever-so-slightly blurry mirror, but still recognizable as the woman her husband called “the blond princess of Perry Street,” after their Greenwich Village address. Her makeup is subtle, her strappy sandals a triumph (no more high-top sneakers for ankle support).
The worst scars are on her back, she says, yet they do not deter her from wearing a bathing suit. Her husband says her personality seems to erase the physical scars: “People look at her, and they don’t see it.”
Mercifully, the past is receding. Mr. Manning said he no longer remembered all the words to “My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose,” the poem he recited to his wife like an anthem while she was unconscious.
They declined to say how much they received from the Victim Compensation Fund, but moved uptown from their Village apartment last year. Mrs. Manning, director of global market data at Cantor Fitzgerald before the terrorist attack, said she was “in the slow lane now” and felt a pang about not working, for the first time in her life. “You’re allowed,” her husband said.
She still follows the markets as a hobby, works with Cantor Fitzgerald’s 9/11 relief fund and collects art. She perked up as she rhapsodized about John Wesley, the pop artist, admiring what she called his “sly humor” and eroticism.
Mr. Manning left his Wall Street job in July to devote himself to writing full time; he said he had not settled on a first project.
Their son, Tyler, is learning to play Led Zeppelin on the guitar, following in the footsteps of his father, who plays bass in a band called the Rolling Bones. Tyler wants to name his band either the Bloody Eyes or the Flaming Togas. He wants to be a doctor when he grows up. Mrs. Manning does not stop to psychoanalyze.
She revels in small pleasures like reading to Tyler (the apocalyptic fantasy world of “Gregor the Overlander” is his current favorite) and taking him to play dates and soccer. Sometimes, the boy asks his mother, “Why did you have to go to work in that place?”
His father answers. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime event,” Mr. Manning tells his son. “She got through. None of us can tell the future.”
Lisa Schwartz contributed research.
www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/nyregion/10injured.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all
Article Tools Sponsored By
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
Published: September 9, 2008
Lauren Manning’s handshake is strong, almost bionic. You might think it was a byproduct of decades of playing tennis and golf. But her grip has been painfully relearned, and bolstered with more titanium pins than she cares to count.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
James Estrin/The New York Times
Elaine Duch worked at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on the 88th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Multimedia
Surviving 9/11, but Not ForgettingAudio Slide Show
Surviving 9/11, but Not Forgetting
Related
Times Topics: Sept. 11, 2001
Enlarge This Image
James Estrin/The New York Times
Elaine Duch was injured in the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center.
On a hot summer day, she wore flirtatiously high-heeled sandals, creased white trousers and a long-sleeved blue blouse, leaving only feet and hands exposed. So much of her skin is still stippled with scars. “My tattoos,” she said with a rueful smile, as though they were an indelible remnant of a carefree youth. Only in her case, she noted, they cannot be “lasered off.”
On Sept. 11, 2001, Mrs. Manning — newly married, the mother of a 10-month-old boy, at the top of her profession on Wall Street — was met by a fireball as she strode into the lobby of the World Trade Center. On a day that New York City hospitals waited to be overwhelmed by casualties, only to realize that most people either perished in the collapse of the Twin Towers or streamed out into the holocaust of ashes largely intact, she was among the oft-forgotten few who were severely injured yet survived.
In the face of 3,000 dead, it was easy to overlook the relative handful like Mrs. Manning, who was burned over 80 percent of her body and spent weeks on the brink of death, then months at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. If the nation’s worst terrorist attack is fading in many memories as its seventh anniversary approaches, it remains an everyday reality for these victims, etched in their changed appearance, their constant pain, their consciousness that they are both deeply lucky and unfathoScably unlucky.
Mrs. Manning, 47, whose plight became public when the e-mail updates that her husband, Greg, sent to family and friends turned into a bestselling book, has returned to some semblance of her old life. But there are still so many things she cannot do.
She cannot walk her terrier, Caleigh, who weighs just 29 pounds but “pulls a lot,” or cook a full meal because the smallest nick in her delicately healed skin risks infection. She could not apply the glitter or fasten the hooks during a snowflake-making session in her son’s first-grade class.
“Through the grace of the people in my life, I am able to conduct what appears at first glance in many ways more normal than it is beneath the surface,” Mrs. Manning said recently. “My husband, he’s been my hands.”
A Long Road
There is no clear accounting of how many people were seriously injured that day. Of the $7 billion distributed by the federal government’s September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, $6 billion went to the families of those killed at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and in the plane that went down in Pennsylvania; $1 billion went to the injured. Most of the injured were firefighters, and most of the payments were for respiratory ailments.
Burns accounted for 40 of the 2,680 injury payments.
Eighteen of the most gravely burned were taken that day to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. A dozen of those survived.
Some, like Mrs. Manning and Harry Waizer, who both worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, have regained a sense of equilibrium. For others, like Elaine Duch, who was a senior administrative assistant in the real estate department at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the before and after are clearly demarcated.
Ms. Duch, 56, has cut herself off from her old friends, partly because, as she put it, “I’m never going to be the Elaine that I used to be.” Of her current friends, Ms. Duch said, “Well, see, they did not know me before, they only know me as an injured person.”
Nowadays, she goes to the New Jersey Shore with her twin sister and a woman who saw her on the news and who sent her cards and letters every day of the five months she spent in rehabilitation. She no longer drives because her hands are too weak and she is easily rattled. She avoids zippers, tiny buttons and opening the wax paper in cereal boxes. She suffers through summers and winters because her burned skin does not tolerate heat and cold very well.
“I felt like I was young when this happened, and I feel like I’m old now,” Ms. Duch said. “I feel like my past life was a different life.”
Since she can no longer work, in her mind’s eye her professional self still haunts the upper reaches of the North Tower, where she was standing in a hallway when the flames came; she managed to get down, only to be given last rites as she emerged from the building. “I’m still stuck at the 88th floor,” she says. “That’s my office.”
Her days now are filled mainly with physical therapy and psychotherapy. She has taken up painting, in what she says is a search for inner beauty. She sold her house and bought a condo in Bayonne, N.J. She changed her hair color from blond to black.
“I am happy to celebrate every birthday,” Ms. Duch said. “I am never, ever going to be the Elaine that I used to be, but I could have been dead at 49.”
Unlike Ms. Duch, Mr. Waizer is back working as a tax lawyer in Cantor Fitzgerald’s new Midtown Manhattan headquarters. Because of his injuries, he has reduced stamina and responsibilities; he no longer is the head of the tax department but, he said, he never cared much for titles.
“When you are in the hospital for as long as I was and at home for as long as I was, you think about what it is that you want to do with your life,” said Mr. Waizer, 57, who spent about two and a half years recovering from his burns before returning to work. “I realized after a time that while I still had that question, and like most people I always will have some of that question remaining, I liked what I did.”
In testimony before the 9/11 Commission on its first day of hearings in 2003, Mr. Waizer recounted how he had been going up to his office on the 104th floor when he felt an explosion and the elevator began to plummet. Burned as he beat out the flames, Mr. Waizer got out on the 78th floor and took the stairs to the ground, seeing looks of horror and sympathy on the faces of those who let him pass.
He was given a 5 percent chance of survival. Despite back pain, scarring and nerve damage, he has regained a sense of physical normalcy, though with gentle wit, he draws a line between his recovery and Ms. Manning’s, saying, “I was never as pretty as she was.”
Perhaps the most distinctive relic of his injuries is his whispery, soothing voice, possibly caused by inhaling jet fuel that left him with “a bit of vocal cord paralysis.”
Mr. Waizer, who lives in Edgemont, in Westchester County, and has three children ages 17, 19 and 20, said his 9/11 experience has strengthened his ties to his wife, Karen, and sharpened his moral compass. “It’s more important for me to be a good person,” Mr. Waizer said.
After the Nightmares
“Love, Greg & Lauren” is a chronicle of the three months after the terrorist attacks, as seen from Lauren Manning’s bedside. Greg Manning, who at the time was a senior vice president at Euro Brokers, in the south tower — but who was home that morning with the baby — sent daily e-mail messages to loved ones describing his efforts to connect to his comatose wife through music and poetry and baseball.
The intimate diary then details the critical moments of Mrs. Manning’s recovery as she regained consciousness — her first words were “Hi, Greg,” on Nov. 12 — and slowly began to understand what had happened. It ends in mid-December 2001, when Mrs. Manning left the hospital for a rehabilitation center. The couple agreed to talk about their lives since then, in a sort of sequel, though they asked to meet at the Midtown headquarters of Random House, the book’s publisher, rather than their home.
Mrs. Manning burst into the glass-walled conference room a half-step ahead of her husband, smiling and thrusting out one of the hands that had been so badly burned when she pushed the lobby doors open to escape.
She spent the first month in a medically induced coma having visions, she said, of falling through space into a frightening arctic darkness, nearly missing being speared on stalagmites, only to be saved repeatedly at the last minute by landing on a ledge.
Now the nightmares have receded.
“I sleep well,” Mrs. Manning said. “My dreams are of what I need to do in the future.”
She is as tiny as a sparrow. Her face is subtly different from the photograph on the book jacket, as if reflected in an ever-so-slightly blurry mirror, but still recognizable as the woman her husband called “the blond princess of Perry Street,” after their Greenwich Village address. Her makeup is subtle, her strappy sandals a triumph (no more high-top sneakers for ankle support).
The worst scars are on her back, she says, yet they do not deter her from wearing a bathing suit. Her husband says her personality seems to erase the physical scars: “People look at her, and they don’t see it.”
Mercifully, the past is receding. Mr. Manning said he no longer remembered all the words to “My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose,” the poem he recited to his wife like an anthem while she was unconscious.
They declined to say how much they received from the Victim Compensation Fund, but moved uptown from their Village apartment last year. Mrs. Manning, director of global market data at Cantor Fitzgerald before the terrorist attack, said she was “in the slow lane now” and felt a pang about not working, for the first time in her life. “You’re allowed,” her husband said.
She still follows the markets as a hobby, works with Cantor Fitzgerald’s 9/11 relief fund and collects art. She perked up as she rhapsodized about John Wesley, the pop artist, admiring what she called his “sly humor” and eroticism.
Mr. Manning left his Wall Street job in July to devote himself to writing full time; he said he had not settled on a first project.
Their son, Tyler, is learning to play Led Zeppelin on the guitar, following in the footsteps of his father, who plays bass in a band called the Rolling Bones. Tyler wants to name his band either the Bloody Eyes or the Flaming Togas. He wants to be a doctor when he grows up. Mrs. Manning does not stop to psychoanalyze.
She revels in small pleasures like reading to Tyler (the apocalyptic fantasy world of “Gregor the Overlander” is his current favorite) and taking him to play dates and soccer. Sometimes, the boy asks his mother, “Why did you have to go to work in that place?”
His father answers. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime event,” Mr. Manning tells his son. “She got through. None of us can tell the future.”
Lisa Schwartz contributed research.
