be healthy

For years, I've been a psychological consultant to several units of the New York City Police Department, and right after 9/11, I was asked to come down and offer emotional support and assistance to the officers who were there. Along with a group of other mental health professionals, I walked and walked through the streets around Ground Zero, and talked with as many police officers as I could.

I suppose my first 'case study' that day was me. I noticed that when I first saw the site, and all the destruction, I was numb. I simply couldn't allow myself to feel the impact of this event. And I knew that if the emergency workers at Ground Zero, who were working around the clock in this horrible scene, could not find a way to process the sensory information they were receiving, and ventilate somehow...then it would come out later, and could come out in very powerful and destructive ways. I wanted to speak with as many police officers as I could so that they could release some of the pressure they felt. Tell their stories.

And then I happened to see an officer I knew from the past through my counseling, a patient of mine. We were happy to see each other, both of us happy to see someone familiar in all this. I asked how he was and he said, "OK," and then we were quiet, and then he told me the story of where he'd been on 9/11.

He had been one of the first officers to report to the scene, and had helped to evacuate people from the Trade Center buildings. He described how when the first building came down, he was running, that everyone was running. He got hit on the head with a piece of debris and dove under a car. His head was under the car, but his legs were hanging out and his uniform caught on fire. A woman passing in the street put out the flames on his uniform. He got out from under the car and kept running, trying to outrun the cloud of smoke, but he couldn't outrun it. He told me that he was engulfed by the cloud, but that it wasn't just smoke. It felt wet and moist, as though there were human fluids in the cloud. He had a look in his eye as if he was somewhere else. And I knew he was still in shock. We talked and talked until it seemed he'd said all he wanted to say. And I like to think it helped him.

As for me? I felt lucky to be able to do something to help. To be able to offset some of the long-term effects of this trauma by helping the emergency workers understand some of what they could expect to feel as a result of all this. To explain how they might avoid some of these long-term effects. Yes. I felt lucky. And I suppose it helped me as much as it helped anyone.