Hope

ENT DARK FOR A FEW DAYS...

Sorry bout that...I don't know if sharing my soul feelings is a good thing or a bad thing...this blog is suffering as I am from not knowing how to deal with certain aspects of life.  One of those is losing hope.  I guess I'm playing my own therapist?  I know grief is very difficult and it can flip you over on your head.  It's not just that, it is the measuring stick of life that has me disillusioned. Did you know the last thing you lose in life is hope?

No I'm not off my rocker, I am sane, and I am a functioning adult.  But not everyone can say that.  I do sometimes have nightmares from the whole 911 thing and the building collapse in FL has brought back a lot of those memories.  PTSD is a real thing.  We may not even realize we have it or are suffering from it.  We did have talks with Phycologists after it happened...I was employed at the time with Con Edison.  We had all watched the entire event unfold across the river from our bank of corporate windows on Hudson Ave in Brooklyn, just over the river...but then as a newly minted NY state EMT I joined the volunteer effort to triage survivors that we thought would be found, and since there were none as in the FL collapse, we ended up cataloging the bodies they brought in from the rubble pile. I did that for 3 days then I went back to work as our office had been closed until the trains were moving again.

I was there when building 7 collapsed and we all ran for our lives, because we had no clue how far it could reach...the towers collapsed at about 9 am and building 7 collapsed around 5:30 in the afternoon when ALL of us were there trying to help victims. I was NOT working on the rubble pile, I was  with a group of volunteers who would render first aid to any survivor they may pull out and I had been there since around 1 pm...we had set up tables and stocked them with wound treatment, splints, general triage items so we could do vitals and we had ambulances waiting to move people to hospitals etc...so when we hear the rumble someone said RUN, and we did...I was actually asked by a news reporter on camera if this would change how I live my life, I replied, "no, because if it does then they won." 

I think If I had to answer that question again I would say "YES, I want to understand why they hate us enough to do this."  Did anyone of you actually try to find the answer to that question? I tried to read the Koran after that and since no religion makes sense to me, it made no sense to me at all...what I learned is "don't allow your mind to be highjacked by extremists." 

That building was very unstable as  you could see  horrible collateral damage  the towers one and two caused while falling down. I lived on 4th street and Ave A in the East Village. North of Houston St.  That night I slept on a park bench just out of "ground zero" as we started calling it.... because I had this HUGE hope survivors were going to be  found...and I wanted to help them if possible...but I just collapsed from exhaustion of the day and I remember looking up at the stars in the sky and asking "why"?

The next morning I walked to my apartment, I lived on the 22 floor of a 26 floor building, to clean up and eat, and then walked back down to ground zero met up with my co-volunteers and that is when I was asked to work in the temp morgue area.... I saw the real horror of what a collapse does to the  human body.  In my apartment there was a pile of ash at least 6 inches thick on all my window ledges, and it stayed there for months until rains could wash it all away.

Eventually two weeks later I began my job as an EMT then went on to become Paramedic and after 6 years of losing hope I quit and left the city.

So Im waiting for rain to wash it all away.