I was two months into my fellowship and one hour into a subtotal colectomy when a tech entered the operating room and announced that one of the towers at the World Trade Center was on fire. From then on, updates floated into the room every few minutes. At the news of a second plane striking the second tower, I saw Arg in my mind. The screech of fighter planes strafing the palace echoed in my ear. The smell of cauterized skin sent my heart pounding. If the team in that room could have seen my vital signs at that moment, they would have asked me to take a seat.

But I have trained myself to breathe my way through fire and ash. I focused on the procedure and didn’t let my eyes go anywhere outside the surgical field, draped in blue. I made rounds on the floor, checking in on my patients and reviewing labs and doing my best not to look out the windows.

A man in a thin gray gown stood in the doorway of his hospital room, tethered to an IV pole. He looked over at the empty nurses’ station. A young nurse emerged from the room next door, her scrubs stiff and her sneakers crisply white.

Please, the man had moaned. He held on to his IV pole with one hand and pressed his paunch with the other. I haven’t taken a shit in three days. Can’t you give me something?

Nothing changed on our unit. Infections and pain, life and death, all carried on as usual.

The city outside shut down, all eyes turned to the news. I stayed in the hospital, not only to care for our surgical patients upstairs but to be available to help. I wasn’t the only one.

I walked through the emergency room, where doctors and nurses sat on gurneys or gathered around television screens to see what was happening just a few subway stops away. Rooms and equipment had been readied for the crush of patients that everyone believed would soon arrive. With the number of people working in those buildings, every hospital in New York City was on alert.

We didn’t dress a single wound.

People in and around those towers either survived unscathed or died on the scene. There was nothing in between.

Once the wireless networks were working again, I got a call from Mom every two hours. It was a glimpse of what she must have been like in the field, assessing risks, gathering information, and disseminating plans.