Chapter 03: 9/11
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Description
In this chapter, Dr. Porter talks about her experience as an emergency management leader at Lenox Hill Hospital when the terrorist attacks occurred in New York City on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. She had been recruited to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City in 1999 and was serving as Bioterrorism Coordinator. She describes the scenario at the hospital as reports of the attacks on the Twin Towers came through. She describes coping with her own knowledge that her son worked in a building across the street from the Twin Towers and her concerns when she was unable to contact him or her daughters.
She explains how the hospital realized there would be no influx of wounded survivors and how they turned their attention to “what can we do for the community?”
Next, Dr. Porter talks about how 9/11 forced her to realize how important it is for a leaders to control her own demeanor –despite personal feelings-- for the sake of the institution she is leading. She underscores how important it is for a leader to identify colleagues she can lean on and how important it is to be able to multi-task and attend to the impact the emergency is having on people.
Dr. Porter talks about how her children handled the emergency.
She then reflects briefly on how the city recovered from the terrorist attacks, holding the New York Marathon. She talks about her participation and how this helped her see the city returning to normal.
Identifier
PorterC_01_20180104_C03
Publication Date
1-4-2018
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN, Oral History Interview, January 04, 2018
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Professional Path; Personal Background; Leadership; On Leadership; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So what happened during 9/11, that you had to respond to, in situ, at Lenox Hill?
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
Well, immediately, I was in the EC rounding on patients and staff, and we had TVs for the patients to watch, and it was captured on the cameras in New York City and there were so many screams and yells for me, telling me to come and look, and that’s when I saw that. That was not even imagined by myself, like I didn’t even consider something like that. So, immediately you’re thinking okay, victims, people are going to come, they could come quickly, it’s just like two miles, two, three miles that’s it, to the Twin Towers. So, immediately, we went into disaster mode and everybody started to do whatever they had to do in our disaster plan. They got ready, the floors got ready, everybody got ready. At the same time, I had staff come to me saying, “My husband works in that building.” So at the same time that I was—and again, I’m not operating alone. There were several of me in that building doing other things, including the president or the CEO. But I realized that okay, we have really, two big issues. Number one, a lot of people have family members in those buildings, so we had to worry about how do you console somebody who just saw the building go down? So I just, I got a hold of our psych, I think I went to the Psychiatry Department, because I don’t think we had EAP at that time, we might have but I don’t remember. So we reached out to our HR colleagues and everybody else, to please help them. I remember the phones—if I remember correctly, three of the major companies, two companies had towers in the tower and they went down, there was only one cell phone that was working. I had one of them, it was working, and so I told her to call, and of course she didn’t get an answer. And it wasn’t just her, isolated, but she was the one that was most in front of me. So then I asked somebody to take care of her and try to help her reach her family, whatever. Meanwhile, everything is going and the CEO and I are talking, and they’re coming into the ED, and the CNO came over and everything else, and we were getting everything prepared, and in the back of my mind I’m thinking I have this really important job to do, but my son was working in a building right across the street.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh my God.
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
So I’m thinking oh my God, is he okay, and then trying to be very strong outward, because people are looking at you. If you’re going to start to crumble, then we’re crumbling with you, so you can’t.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
What’s your son’s name?
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
Michael. So, I was about to take a few seconds to try to get a hold of him on the phone and he called me. I was in the EC and he said to me, “Mom, a plane came into the building across the street.” He said, “They’re telling us to stay on the floor and don’t leave the building.” He said, “I’m evacuating this entire floor.” He was a brand new graduate, college graduate. So he took—and I said—he said, “I love you,” and that was it, click, no more cell service for him. So, I actually wanted to vomit, I had a visceral reaction to it, but I was so thankful that he was truly my son, he was evacuating their floor, because he knew that sometimes you have to do things like that, sometimes you have to use your common sense, and thank God he did, because even though he wasn’t in the Tower, the heat, the smoke, the ashes, and people jumping out of windows, they were involved in all that. When you see those films with the—he was running just like everybody else was. Anyway, so being the children of an emergency nurse, they were pretty skilled as not a clinical person, but understood emergencies, and I kind of felt that my daughters would be tracking everybody remotely and then would get a hold of me, because I couldn’t reach them.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
And you’re daughters’ names?
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
Amy and Lauren. Anyway, so I continued to do what I was doing. I had a lot of communication with the CEO, who was the incident commander for the institution, and very quickly, we realized that we were not going to get any ambulances, or very few. The city of New York, the community, had a line that wrapped around the whole city block, wanting to donate blood, but we didn’t have patients. So we had to pull in our social, our community media people and everything else to say okay, what do we do for the community, because they need to do something, they want to do something. So then I think we started to reach out to blood banks all over, to find out, can you use blood, because we can only use so much because we don’t have any patients. That was a pretty common theme around there. Then we assigned people to work the lines, we had volunteers and other people in the hospital, their assignment was to work those lines and give them water, give them snacks, whatever. Anyway, it was probably in the late afternoon when we started getting people that walked up or ran up, some people ran up. If you’re a runner you could run, it was only about two miles, two and a half, three miles, so some people showed up early but it was mostly inhalation, smoke inhalation, little bits of fragments in their eyes or whatever, a lot of emotional distress, so we set up a whole counseling center across the street from the hospital.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Let me just pause for a sec, because we’re are quarter of eleven.
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
Yes, yes.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So, did you want to stop at this point?
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
Yeah, I think so.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay, okay.
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
The only other thought I would say about that is—because you asked me what I learned about everything else. What I learned about that was how important—you don’t realize it, as a leader, how important your demeanor is in an emergency, that you have to—even if you feel like crumbling yourself you can’t, and you have to find out who you can lean on. So there was a chair of radiation, of the Radiology Department, who I had worked very closely in the Lenox Hospital, on the emergency management committee we had locally, and he and I were --and the CNO. The three of us were constantly in communication with each other, and then the CEO was not only looking to him, she, whenever we had meetings, she wanted me to sit right next to her. So, it started to make me feel oh, she must think that she can trust me, like it was a whole learning experience, unfortunately, but also then, how to multitask. It’s not just the event, it’s what did it do to the people around you. Even if you didn’t have somebody in that tower or towers, being in the proximity of New York City during that, it had an effect for, I would probably say a couple of years. I mean, and then how do you—the good news up to that—the end of that story, we’ll continue another time, is that later on in the afternoon, my youngest daughter, she called me, she got through. Maybe she didn’t call me. She might have sent me an email, I think she sent me an email, because I think I had broken away to just see if they—because I couldn’t talk to them and I couldn’t talk to my son any more. She had gave me the, “I talked to Michael, he’s fine, Amy is good, I’m fine, are you okay?” So she had organized everything, again, one of my daughters.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
She takes after her mom.
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
Right, exactly. Every single time we do anything like that, anything, you learn from it, you know you learn from it and you never forget it. We don’t have time to talk about it, but the New York City Marathon, Giuliani [Rudolph William Louis Giuliani KBE, former mayor of New York City] was going to cancel it that year. I was supposed to run the marathon that year, and so because I was a bioterrorism coordinator, I couldn’t run, because I was, for the next two months, I was working late hours, I was staying over, everything else. And then Giuliani decided to have it, with the fighter jets, you name it, all over, cautioned to don’t take food from anybody, because they thought that something would happen. So, I was doing to drop out and somebody said, “Don’t drop out, just run until you don’t want to run anymore.” So I went with that mindset and everywhere you ran past a firehouse, they crossed the ladders across the street. [knock on the door] Come in. I know, this is thirty seconds. Okay. We took food away. You can’t go through Brooklyn without taking something from the Italian ladies, you just have to take it. So I took food from them, because I wanted them to feel good, and I ran on adrenaline and I finished the race and I ran on adrenaline. I hadn’t run in two months or three months, whatever it was. It was early November, so two months.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s a great sign of normalcy for the city.
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
Yeah. I mean, he made a good decision, you felt safe because the jets were going over the path all the time. Talk about camaraderie? Everybody in that race was doing it because of 9/11, I mean they were in it already but they decided not to cancel. That was another something bright that came—I’m not saying anything bright came out of it, but I think that was part of the healing process.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, I think in the aftermath of an event like that, you have to find whatever bright spots you can, to go on.
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
Yeah, oh yeah.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. Otherwise, it’s just constant survivor’s guilt, which is not good.
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
Yeah, no, no, no. It was a lot of lessons learned, and we don’t have time to talk about it, but a lot of lessons learned after that. Anyway, okay.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, thank you. We can close off for today and I’ll look forward to our next conversation.
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
Okay, that’s great.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Thank you very much.
Carol Porter, DNP, RN, FAAN:
Thank you.
T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:
I’m turning off the recorder at about ten minutes of eleven.
Recommended Citation
Porter, Carol DNP, RN, FAAN and Rosolowski, Tacey A., "Chapter 03: 9/11" (2018). Interview Chapters. 1377.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1377
Conditions Governing Access
Open
