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An atypical 9/11 story, bear with me: Although I'll never forget that day, particularly experiencing it as an active duty soldier on a military base that went into immediate lockdown, another memory stands out even more.
As a new PGY-4 surgery resident, life went back to cases and call-nights like any other training program, but with the added buzz around us of a military preparing to go to war. And no one goes to war without surgeons.
A couple months after 9/11, I was on the CT surgery service and scrubbing in to do my first-ever formal lung resection. At the scrub sink with my attending, Dr. N, shooting the breeze and discussing our approach for the case.
His pager goes off - not one of our hospital pagers but a different pager that I'd noticed he wore all the time. He looked down, sighed, and said "I'll be back". Ten minutes later he is back and says, "I have to go, I talked to Dr. K and he will staff the case with you".
That was it - very matter-of-fact, no fanfare or fear, like it was completely ordinary to be called away like that. Didn't realize I wouldn't see him again for about 6 months. Heard some of the other attendings saying he was deploying with "JSOC" or "the secret squirrels".
I had no idea what that meant at the time - completely naive to this other side of military medicine that had been largely inactive or behind the scenes for a long time.
Another attending joined our staff a month later after returning from a short deployment to Afghanistan. He told me, "I ran into Dr. N near Kandahar. He had a full beard, wearing civilian clothes, and was going by 'Mr. Smith'. And was with some serious looking dudes".
That day at the scrub sink is when it really hit home how much had changed after 9/11, and what it meant to be a military surgeon - joining a long line who came before us.
Over the next 15 years that became our new reality - working at home like any other surgeon, then getting the call & stepping off a helicopter somewhere to join a new team that rapidly became like family. Hard to believe that one day's events changed our futures so completely.
Lives lost and lives saved, years away from home and many happy reunions, most of us came back but some of us didn't. Lessons learned at way too high a price, and always the obligation to answer that page and say "I have to go".
