For me 9-11 was about more than a single day…that whole week was a blur. I remember being in the ICU of the hospital where I worked, rounding on the postsurgical patients, weary after a long 12+ hour day in surgery, and being up the night with my 2 month old son. So I was in the ICU, a big circular room in the middle of a dozen patient rooms, some of the patients were sedated and on ventilators, most were just being monitored very closely after heart surgery. I was a Surgical PA for a large Cardiology group in New Mexico, at that time I was a PA in the New Mexico Army National Guard. The rooms were faced with glass, so you could see into them, and each had a television in them. So when everything started to happen, we were drawn to the couple of TV’s that were tuned to a new channel, and then in a minute they were all tuned to them, I would stop and watch some new tragedy unfold as I would examine each patient, and remove tubes and wires from patients, listening to their heart and lungs, and finally writing the notes in their charts in the middle of a dozen televisions screaming tragedy and loss at me from all directions. What a long morning, and of course as the minutes wore on, my pager and phone started buzzing and ringing with messages, alert messages from my unit, security alerts from the local Air Force base where my wife was now locked in “for the duration” and were my son was in a day care near Sandia National Laboratory, and now heavily guarded for security reasons. After that moment, when I checked out with my relief, I stood still for a moment and knew, in a way that I knew as I stood in Kuwait before the ground invasion of Desert Storm that my life wouldn’t be the same. Then I looked the doctors and nurses in the eye, bid them Godspeed, asked them to keep their families close, and turned and walked out the automatic door…