Miss Becky's Blog

A Time to Heal ... a LOVE story from September 11th

Dearest Friends . . .

This is one of the "Love Letters" that I sent to our Chinese Friends after September 11, 2001 (so some of you may have already read it). But it is a wonderful TRUE story showing the power of love. We never know what can happen to those we love and when a couple marry they promise to love and help each other, regardless what happens. This story also helps us realize the impact of 9/11 in the lives of individual people. As you read this article, note all the different people who "helped" this lady, especially the medical people.

I would like to dedicate this story to all our Chinese MEDICAL friends who are dedicating their lives to the service of others ... it's not an easy thing to do and it can be very difficult at times. But you can and are making an important difference in the world, one person at a time, and you are loved for it.

A TIME TO HEAL, by Greg Manning (Reader's Digest, April 2002) A picture of the couple is attached.

At eight o'clock on the morning of September 11, 2001, my wife, Lauren, was a vibrant, athletic and beautiful woman, the picture of health. At about 8:30 am she breezed through our living room, saying how she'd solved a scheduling problem, making business calls that delayed her departure about 15 minutes. She lingered in the hallway, saying goodbye to our ten-month-old son, Tyler. Then she headed off to work, in a taxi to the World Trade Center, where she was (and is) a senior vice president and director of global sales data for the Cantor Fitzgerald Company.

Less than 20 minutes later, as I was listening to the radio I heard "What's this? A plane hit the World Trade Center?" Running to the terrace of our apartment, I looked down toward the Twin Towers. At the top of Tower One, I saw a vast hole billowing black smoke. I could see that a plane had hit at or just below Cantor's offices and that the impact had been huge. I kept calling Lauren's phone numbers, but her office line was busy and her cell phone wasn't ringing. I paced the apartment, pounding the wall.

Then I watched as the second plane hit Tower Two, seemingly right at the 84th floor, my office at Euro Brokers, where I was a senior vice president. Part of me was in shock: I'd been scheduled to attend a conference that morning at Windows on the World on the 107th floor.

Friends and family began calling our home to make sure we were all right. I couldn't say whether Lauren was alive; I was almost certain she was dead.

But she wasn't.

Arriving at the World Trade Center, she'd heard a whistling sound, entered the lobby to investigate and been met by anexplosive fireball. She ran outside in flames. A salesman saw her and two others running from the building. He raced across the street to her and put out the flames that were consuming her. Lauren was lucid enough to tell the man her name and number. People had fled, and there was no one else around for blocks. As heavy steel debris fell from a thousand feet above them, the man stayed with Lauren until the ambulance came.

At about 9:35 am our phone rang. A breathless voice said, "Mr. Manning, I'm with your wife. She's been badly burned, but she's going to be okay. We got her in an ambulance." Then the phone cut off. I learned later that this man had saved Lauren's life.

Twenty minutes later a nurse called to tell me Lauren was at St. Vincent's Hospital, eight blocks away. Fighting tears, not knowing what to expect, I made my way there through the stunned crowds. I found Lauren in a bed on the tenth floor, all but her face draped in white sheets. Her skin looked deeply tanned. Her eyebrows had been burned off and her beautiful blond hair was charred. The first think she said to me was "Get me to a burn unit."

Then she said, "Greg, I was on fire. I ran out. I prayed to die. Then I decided to live for Tyler and you." She asked me to apply balm to her blistered lips. Her pain grew and she begged for morphine. She became less aware, and her face began to swell from the IV fluids she was receiving. They transferred her to a private room and asked me to step out. For the next two hours the nurses dressed her wounds.

At five that afternoon, a bed was found for her in the Burn Center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Lauren was taken to a glass-walled room on the eighth floor, where doctors and nurses surrounded her bed. Someone let me to the waiting room down the hall. Heartbroken and desperate, I sagged into a chair.

Lauren had been burned over 82 percent of her body--the majority of her burns third-degree.

HANGING IN THERE . . . With the city locked down, home seemed far away, unreachable. Joyce, Tyler's Nanny (a nanny is a person hired to care for children in their own homes) stayed with our son that night while I dozed in the waiting room in case I was called to Lauren's bedside.

On Wednesday, Lauren's parents arrived from Savannah, Georgia. They would end up staying with us for the next three months, giving us a major assist. Lauren's sister came in from New Jersey and her brother from North Carolina. I asked my own family in Florida--my parents and my sister--to remain at home for the time being; I didn't have a place for them to stay, and I promised to keep them posted on Lauren's condition.

On Thursday a gray-haired man in a white coat met me in the waiting room. Dr. Roger Yurt was the director of the Burn Center and Lauren's doctor. In a calm voice he described exactly what she was up against. The first 72 hours were the resuscitation phase, during which she was receiving an extraordinary amount of fluids to replace those she was losing through her wounds. She was heavily sedated and would remain in a drug-induced coma for weeks. She was on a ventilator to support her breathing and there was a feeding tube in her nose.

Once Lauren was resuscitated, Dr. Yurt said he would perform numerous grafts to close her wounds and control her injury. Only after she was "closed" would she be out of danger; until then, infection would be a constant threat. The prognosis was bleak, but I felt the first twinge of hope. If anyone on this earth could save Lauren, I thought, Dr. Yurt was the onel.

On Saturday night, September 15, another critical burn patient died, reducing by one the large group of shattered families that had been bonding (getting acquainted and learning to love and support each other) in the waiting room since September 11th. Dr. Palmer Q. Bessey, Yurt's associate director, came out to deliver the news to that patient's family. Later on, he saw me, "She's hanging in there pretty well," he said. "She's going to get sicker before she gets better." Then he added, "But we're going to do everything we can to pull her through. I don't want those bastards to get another person."

On Sunday, September 16, I was told that Lauren's chances were less than 50/50--probably far less. (I was to learn later they were about 15 percent.) I found solace with a rabbi (Jewish priest or church leader) who had come to the Burn Center, and at my request he came in to Lauren's room so that she might hear the holy language and know we were praying for her. That night another World Trade Center burn patient died.

Day after day family, friends and colleagues called from around the world. It grew difficult to repeat the full story, yet I realized that the short version seemed little more than a medical update and that it said nothing of Lauren's courage. So I began writing e-mails. I told everyone about her skin-graft surgeries. I explained how her greatest injuries were to her hands, especially her dominant left hand. Mostly I told everyone how hard Lauren was fighting--about the bravery I saw every day as I sat beside her bed. And as a token of my faith in her, I signed every e-mail the same way: "Love, Greg & Lauren."

CRITICAL CONDITION . . . October 7, 2001. The doctors have done extensive skin grafts on Lauren's back, legs, and left arm and hand. The donor skin was harvested from some undamaged areas of her body--in one case, her scalp. (The scalp is a good choice cosmetically, as the hair grows back to cover any scars.) I've learned that about 80 to 90 percent of these early grafts have now adhered. Though Lauren is still in highly critical condition, this is excellent news.

She remains in a drug-induced coma, but she was more responsive yesterday morning than she has been so far. In the afternoon she was taken to the tank, the room where patients are given a bath that helps remove burned tissue and promote healing. When I saw her back in her room afterward, Lauren's eyes were moving slightly beneath her lids. Her features were becoming more defined, and there are fewer bandages on her face. As one of the nurses put it, "That face is pink," meaning the skin is recovering nicely.

I sat in a chair and looked at my wife. She is largely immobilized and hasn't spoken for nearly four weeks. Time has begun to add up. After taking care of Tyler in the morning, I'm here every day--as are her mom and dad and sister on weekends. But Lauren hasn't truly been around for almost a month.

Her injuries have sent her on a journey far away. We've been trying to get her back, and she has been struggling to come back since. When I see her eyelids move, or her lips, or her arm, I know she's feeling something. I'm incredibly impatient to hear about things from her side.

Lauren's nurse last night was a man who had once studied to be a Catholic priest. He told me that the period since September 11 has changed everyone on the Burn Center staff, just as it's changed the lives of the patients and their families. When he gets tired, he said, he can go home and sleep--while the patients he's treating must struggle 24 hours, 7 days every week.

Since he hadn't heard it before, I told him our story of the morning of September 11. It dawned on me that Lauren probably could not drop and roll (we teach people in America to "drop and roll" if their clothes are on fire to put out the fire as quickly as possible) after she ran from the lobby, (a question that has nagged at me), because she had to keep running away from the flames that carried down the outside of Tower One--meaning she may have been even braver and tougher than I'd thought.

I said to the nurse, "God has something in mind for her." He said he believed that too. Afterward I sat by Lauren's bed, stroking her hair. And I thanked God for every single moment that we still had a glimmer of hope.

To be continued . . . Since this is so long, I'll continue the article in the next letter . . .

Love to all of you!

Miss Becky