biophile6

Thank you from me as well, if that even serves.

I am moreover brimming with potential dialog though. IAMA 40ish yo former cancer biologist who was also trapped at Ground Zero. We were doing a bioinformatics software startup off Williams three blocks away on the other side of the Fed. I was the last train under, then standing under the south tower 6 minutes before it crushed down, looking up at the hulking wreckage, then rerouted on foot to work off Wall and Pine, and was trapped in my building for a half day, eventually crawling out of there with a wet paper towel mask, to get myself up towards St Vincent where it was safer.

Now. The buildings were completely pulverized. I was staggered that the debris was only twenty feet tall. We can assume that we both breathed the same stuff afterwards: silica, concrete, insulation, ground up plumbing, paint titanium, cellulose, metals, fire retardant...even (shudder, but I think) persons. It was all pulverized; vaporized into the everything in the atmosphere. We carry them in us, health and poison. Our lives are living sacrament to those whom we worked along side and served.

Therefore I must ask, partly even for my own illumination:

Did you cough up anything colored? How long did you spend there, in hours? What was the particle size of your mask, just paper? Were you taking multivitamins at the time? Tested for lead afterwards? Long term chronic fatigue? Do you feel planes fly too low now? Sleep well looking at skylines in the distance?

You need not answer any or all of this. It is all horribly grotesque. It was cultural war. To me the experience is unspeakable, but this is your forum and so we fight together. I welcome anything you would share, public or private. I have not reached out to anyone else with the similar experience, and simply left the area to live elsewhere. Bless you.

My hardest memory is that i was among the people to look out on the sea of businesspersons milling underneath, to think, this is unwise, i need to beat it, and thenknow that those two thousand were all crushed to death. I saw them last. I walked, i went back away south, detoured, found new ways to my building. They stayed. Why did i deserve my life? Because i turned away.

I still cough. I have sinus infections. I run, i eat well, i take multis to suppress neoplasms, i have metal filters on my water supply. I try to flush the building materials from my body with every glass, every meal...i am aware of it. It is embedded in my corpus in every way there is.

Someday too, i know that my risk is huge for mesothelioma, and, runner or not, i too will fight, and possibly die. I dont have a tissue like breast that will be earler onset cancer, so my time will come differently. In the meantime i will work as i did, or build an ied detector and demo to the army, as i did afterwards, and hug my daughter, and walk this life with grace like you, that many will not know.

But breast cancer is among the more treatable. Whole races with fifty thousand survivors are run, and adriamycin et al are potent weapons. Whether either of us can link this stuff is epidemiologically more complex than any other question posed as such. It will take decades to sort.

In the meantime we can smile at those who love us.

Then love us with all you are. Bare everything you can risk, and be fearless in how you show it if, if there is good to be made in doing so. For myself i will continue to research, and develop my bioterrorism database, or detectors, or philosophy, or music, and keep trying to bring hope together for others. Because heres the thing:

If they can stop me from loving you through fear

Then they have won

So Fuckem. I made it out. We stride on and now i love bigger.

I am collecting notes. I try to bring myself to do it. I know there arent many of us that were there directly under, directly after. I know that my margin was tiny, that it was only a single minute in my own building after which it came down.

But I did not even sleep last night. It's only been 5.5 hours since I stopped reading the thread. The upset of doing so keeps me focused on working harder, writing defense grants and healthcare software documentation. And realistically, now with a family, it would take me 50k and complete focus to churn it out.

Some of the above is good its true, but its off the cuff writing, choppy, some on the ipad, and hard for me to push out because of the caustic nature of the experience. It's like asking me to relive it all over again, when all that the survivors want is to move on, to be normal. Doing so would cast me into a light of discomfort and spectacle. I'm just trying to use my mind to solve the problem, and the current contracts I have need me.

Perhaps.

I am exploring the possibility that it matters how well nourished you are against tumors, during the time you are being exposed to carcinogens. Its weak, but thats how science goes. Right now, theres nothing to it but me poking at things. No worries