In the hours and days after the morning of September 11, while a stunned nation was still trying to comprehend the magnitude of terrorist attacks that took nearly 7,000 lives, union nurses and health care professionals were already on the job.

They were working at Ground Zero in New York, preparing triage units for casualties that never came. They were walking through the rubble, providing on-site medical care and protective gear to rescue workers. They were bracing at hospitals in New York, New Jersey, Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., clearing beds and mobilizing supplies-- again, in most cases, for survivors who never arrived. They were volunteering at blood donor centers and staffing phones at crisis hotlines. They were counseling the bereaved and the still-searching...serving food to exhausted firefighters and rescue personnel...even caring for injured rescue dogs.

These stories represent only a small fraction of the contributions made to the rescue and healing efforts by the nurses and health professionals of AFT Healthcare and its sister unions. If it were possible, Healthwire would recognize in these pages every one of our members and fellow unionists who took up a post in the face of disaster and gave generously of their skills, compassion and courage. We honor and thank them for their professionalism, their bravery and their service to their country.

Erik Mortensen is a visiting nurse from Brooklyn, one of 9,700 Visiting Nurse Service employees represented by the Federation of Nurses/United Federation of Teachers. On the morning of Sept. 11, Mortensen helped set up a triage center at Stuyvesant High School, near the
disaster site. When no patients came, Mortensen and some fellow nurses and emergency medical technicians headed for Ground Zero, where they went to work washing out the dust-filled and abraded eyes of rescue workers, police and firefighters.

VNS nurses who pitched in with Mortensen included Kathleen Martin, Joy Lee, Magalie Louis and Lisa Baez. Mortensen quickly realized that there was a drastic shortage of respirator masks and other protective gear. He called on friends and family to help, and they came through with box upon box of the desperately needed equipment.
Mortensen's ad hoc partner at Ground Zero was Tamatha Sussman, an EMT from the Stony Brook Ambulance Corps. The two met by accident early in the disaster relief effort and since then have often worked side by side. They talk about their experiences below.

VNS received a call for five nurses. Police escorted us to the Brooklyn Bridge [triage] site. We could see smoke coming from the World Trade Center. There was such a contrast of bright sunlight and black smoke. I said to a policewoman, "There aren't that many patients." She promised we would be on the next bus in.

So a few of us went into Manhattan. We put on our TB masks, which were all we had, and walked around looking for a place that needed us. We wound up at Stuyvesant, where we became part of a huge medical team setting up the triage center. No one came but rescue workers. It was very sad.

Finally someone suggested that maybe we could wash people's eyes. We got bulb syringes and saline and set out. At first we weren't allowed anywhere near [the rescue operations], but we just kept going. It turned out a lot of people needed their eyes washed, but they wouldn't leave the rescue site. As we walked through the streets we saw pieces of the World Trade Center. We saw a building on fire--a fire that took days to put out. One thing I remember is a fireman from a company that had lost a lot of guys. He was talking about "not going home until we get our bodies out." He was saying, "We're not going home until everyone goes home."

One night I worked the volunteer desk at the Jacob Javits Community Center. It was amazing--there were people coming in at three in the morning to volunteer. There's so much community support, so much support from all over the country. It's really something.

Pat Chapman is an intensive care nurse at Cooper Medical Center (a Level I trauma center) and president of Health Professionals and Allied Employees, Local 5118, there. Chapman wound up volunteering at a Red Cross blood donation center in Cherry Hill, N. J., where she saw firsthand how eager the American public was to offer help, in any way they could, to victims of terrorism.

When the attacks came, our hospital went on yellow alert. I really expected we'd have casualties. We were on alert for a day or two. They thought we'd get a lot of patients, but it never came to pass.

They were saying that they didn't need medical people right then, in New York. I was watching TV and felt that I wasn't doing anything. I called my union staff rep, who put me in contact with the Cherry Hill blood donation center, and I went over there.

Since I was a volunteer and not a Red Cross employee, I couldn't draw blood or perform medical duties. So I led people in, helped people fill out paperwork, and directed them about where to go next. I can't tell you how hard the nurses and techs were working that day. It was an all-out effort.

The people were lined up to donate left and right. We got a lot of first timers. People were there because they wanted to do something, and giving blood was how they felt they were able to help. The public just came out in droves. She wanted to stay and keep working. That's how it was with everyone there. We really haven't seen this kind of spirit in our country for a while. It gives you a very warm feeling in your heart.

Pat Cone is a psychiatric nurse for Virtua Community Nursing Services (a home care agency in Burlington County, N.J.) and a member of the Health Professionals and Allied Employees/Local 5105. She spent three days at Ground Zero serving as a crisis counselor at corporations and organizations whose Employee Assistance Plans had requested help. She has continued to volunteer since then, working with survivors, firefighters, EMTs and police.

My first assignment was a securities firm on 55th Street. Then, later, I did a 12-hour stint at Pfizer Pharmaceutical. Their lunchroom looks out over the World Trade Center. A lot of employees had family members who worked at the Trade Center, and they were so close that looking out the window they'd seen the whole event take place in front of them as if on a big movie screen, knowing that their loved ones were in there. On Wednesday, when I worked there, a lot of people still didn't know if their relatives had survived.

Friday I spent at a law firm. One man I counseled, an attorney who lived two blocks from the World Trade Center, had lost his home, his car and all his possessions. When he heard the planes hit, he ran for Battery Park. On the way, he saw a mother he knew with her child in a stroller. He lifted the kid out of the stroller and they all ran, trying to outrun this huge cloud of dust and smoke and fuel oil. We were sitting in his office and a truck backfired, and you could see the hairs going up on the back of his neck. Nothing in his life was untouched by this event.

At Ground Zero, sometimes all the people want is a hug and a thank you and a clean pair of socks. One of our team members carried a basket for blocks, giving drinks to firefighters. She found a guy carrying a search dog and asked him if he needed anything. He wanted her to find a vet to take sutures out of his dog. So she took the dog in her arms and went off and found a vet.

Last week I did a debriefing with a group of five police officers who responded on Sept. 11. On one block where they were on duty, they were near a fire truck that was covered in dust. There were pairs of shoes standing beside the truck, because the firefighters had grabbed their boots when the alarm came and changed into them at the scene. The policemen said that all they could think of, looking at those shoes, was that they'd never be filled again. The firefighters working in the area would wipe the company's emblem clean on the truck whenever they walked by, so that the local company number would always be showing.

A lot of the EMT volunteers I spoke with--were thinking about how they set up all these field hospitals but had no one to treat. Their feeling was that they had left a job undone, and they are still haunted by that.

Tamatha Sussman, an emergency medical technician with the Stony Brook (Long Island) Ambulance Corps, has taken a
leave of absence to volunteer at Ground Zero. An ongoing concern for Sussman is protecting resuce personnel from health effects related to air quality and possible exposure to deadly asbestos.

I was coming from Chelsea Pier, where I was going to be a surgical assistant [at a triage site], but there were no patients. So I started heading downtown and met Erik heading uptown. Erik and I have stuck together through the whole thing. We never met before this, but you wouldn't know it.

You'd wash someone's eyes out, and every other guy had corneal abrasions, because no one had goggles. We were a walking pharmacy--we had painkillers, bandages, gum, drinks.

I didn't know at the time that I was scared, but looking back, I think I was terrified. We saw the crushed fire trucks with ashes all over them. There were papers everywhere, even wedged into fences. But as soon as we found a medical purpose, there was no image of fear in my mind.

There were three masses of alarms from the center of the rubble. Once we heard the alarms go off about 10 feet away, and we saw droves of people sprinting toward us. I shouted to Erik to run. I was running with the respirator on, and it was hard to breathe, so I ripped it off. Then I tripped. A construction worker caught me. One of the buildings, I think it was Liberty Plaza, was about to fall. Two minutes later we all turned around, and it was just like, okay, back to work. You become a different human being when you're down there. You're just thinking, what's my job?

After seeing the conditions, my sister and I got supplies through all these hardware stores in Brooklyn. We got a vanload of stuff--goggles, particle masks, work gloves, disposable boots, whatever they would give us, and distributed them.

The World Trade Center was constructed in 1970s when asbestos was still widely in use. Food tables were set up six feet from where people were digging--and you can ingest asbestos. No one was wearing Level C protection. No one had set up a checkpoint and decontamination center. No one was making sure they were told, "Wash before you hug your eight-year-old at home tonight."

So I worry a little about what we all breathed in. I don't repent being there for a minute, though.

Sally Monahan is a discharge planning nurse at Pascack Valley Hospital (a community hospital about 20 miles from Manhattan) and a member of Health Professionals and Allied Employees, Local 5029. Her skills
were immediately called into play when news of the disaster hit; she began working with utilization review nurses to free beds so that the hospital could serve an expected overflow
of casualties from across the river. Since the attacks,
Monahan has also volunteered at the hospital's Crisis
Resource and Referral Service.

On the morning of Sept.11, we were prepared to take in casualties. There's a natural instinct with health care workers--adrenaline kicks in. People know what they're supposed to do. Patients whose condition made it possible for them to leave were being moved out. Local ambulance services were going to New York, so the hospital used its own vans to bring patients home. We were setting up parts of the hospital to be converted as wards to handle the influx of patients from New York.

We could look out the window of our hospital and see the smoke. We had a lot of employees who didn't know if their loved ones were alive. Four of our employees lost close relatives or spouses.

People in health care, we gear up and want to help. To stand and wait and realize that no one was coming, to get this sinking feeling and look out the window and see that smoke.... When we were told to go home at five p.m., it was a terrible disappointment. You instantly know....

Since the attacks, I've done some work at the Crisis Referral Service. When I came to work Saturday morning to volunteer, the parking lot was half-empty. I thought, what would I feel like if I came here and this hospital was leveled? A physical structure just disintegrated. Everyone I knew inside gone. I can't imagine it.

Melissa Velazquez is an RN and burn specialist at the Washington Hospital
Center in Washington, D.C. The WHC is a regional burn ICU, and Velazquez's unit received eight severely burned patients in the hours after terrorists flew a plane into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, killing nearly 200 people. On vacation leave at the time, Velazquez immediately found a babysitter for her
seven-year-old daughter and volunteered for duty. Since the attacks, Velazquez, who is an active member of the D.C. Nurses Association's Washington Hospital Center local, has testified before Congress on the growing nurse shortage.

The head nurse asked me to come in for the 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. shift. When I got there, they had settled six of the seven patients we had that night. Usually we get one large-burn victim every couple of months. Until that night, I had never seen this volume of patients this badly off.

When you treat a burn patient, a lot of times you have to treat the family as well. It's a terrible shock to them. Of all our patients, at least half were unrecognizable. A family member might say, "That's not my loved one." But there's a quick resilience, often within minutes.

One family didn't want the patient to know what happened. Then there was a patient whose wife told him everything the same night. The patient's reaction was, basically, just stunned to be alive. The second night he started asking his wife definite names--is so-and-so alive? All she could say was that she didn't know. It turned out that two of his friends hadn't gone to work that day, but of those at work in his office, he was the only one who survived.

I was very shocked, but I was concentrating on the task at hand. Also, I knew I had to be part of helping my unit survive this. It's hard [for nurses and staff] because what you see is a tremendous amount of suffering on the patients' part. Taking those patients' dressings down twice a day, it's absolute agony for them. To be the instrument of that torture--well, eventually you need a time out.

You might not be able to use the same kind of reassuring touch with a burn patient as you would with another type of patient, but there are so many of the senses we can use as burn nurses. We talk to them. We explain what we're doing. And you can put on a pair of gloves and hold their hand. I placed my hand on their chests or put my hand on their forehead, telling them everything would be okay.

One patient in our unit passed away a week after the attacks. The patient I cared for the first night is doing very well. And the rest are all doing well.