Normally I’d have been at work at the analyst desk in the Cantor Fitzgerald offices on the 105th floor of the North Tower by 8 a.m., but that day I was running late, so it was about 8:45 when I headed into the lobby. I was jarred by an incredibly loud, piercing whistle, but assumed it was from a nearby construction project and continued to the bank of express elevators.
Then I heard a huge whistling rush of air. With an enormous screeching exhalation, the fire exploded from the elevator banks into the lobby and engulfed me.
“This can’t be happening to me,” I thought.
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The fire slammed me forward and I lurched toward the lobby’s glass doors. I was pushed against them, then sucked backward again by a monstrous inhalation. I battled to escape as the fire grew over me, spreading down my head, my back, my legs. Abruptly, I was spit from the fire’s mouth out of the building onto the sidewalk.
Coming off the curb, my ankle turned under me and snapped. I pushed myself over a median to a patch of grass. I dropped. I began to roll. A man charged toward me and ripped off his jacket to help me smother the flames. The pain burned through me. I felt like I was being pushed into an abyss.
“I can’t leave my son, I haven’t had enough time with him,” I pleaded to God.
The impulse to let go grew overwhelming, but the thought that my love for my son might not be enough was devastating. I had to fight.
The roar of a plane drew my eye, and I looked up as a tail vanished into the South Tower. The man stayed with me as more agonizing seconds ticked by. Objects began to thud to the ground.
Ambulances pulled up, but the medics ran toward the buildings. Understanding that they would not be coming for me, I rose up off the grass. My companion helped me get to the nearest ambulance.
“Is my face going to be all right?” I asked him.
“Your face is OK,” he said.
I was placed on a stretcher. But the EMTs stepped around me, tending to others in the packed vehicle. I could see I’d been pegged as a goner.
I was brought to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where I was given fluids and a hand-held intravenous pump to self-administer morphine. But my hands were covered in bandages and they were so badly burned I couldn’t move my fingers to press the button.
My husband Greg, alerted by St. Vincent’s, sprinted the eight blocks from our home to my side.
When I saw him, his face was tight with worry.
Swathed in sheets, my head wrapped in bandages, I asked Greg the same question I’d asked my savior in the grass an hour earlier.
“How does my face look?”
“It just looks like you’re really tan,” he said.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my chances for survival were miniscule. Every day nurses had to scrub my wounds to prevent infection, which was my biggest threat. The process is so painful that I had to be in a coma to endure it.
Sixty-seven days passed before I could see my 1-year-old son, Tyler. I was desperate to see him, but also afraid. I looked nothing like the mother who kissed him goodbye on the morning of Sept. 11. The day he finally visited, with my mother and Greg, I wore a touch of perfume on my clothing in the hopes he’d remember it.
“That’s mommy,” my mother said. Tyler looked directly at me; finally recognition filled his face. He knew it was me. My fears evaporated. Many surgeries and years of physical therapy followed, but through it all, Greg and Tyler kept me going — my husband who told me I was beautiful every day, and my son who would run to give me Eskimo kisses. I had to relearn a lot of things: how to write, walk, even ride a bike. Luckily Tyler was learning those things too, so I got to do them with him.
We lost a lot that day, but I was always determined the terrorists would not get one more victim; they would not get me.