When Ray Garza walked into the emergency department of a Manhattan hospital on Sept. 12, 2001, he was jolted.
Not by the sight of injured people: Garza expected to see the medical staff still treating casualties of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but it was a slow day in the ER.
“It was the closest hospital to Ground Zero,” the Vancouver man said. “I asked the nurse, ‘Where are all the people?’ ”
The nurse’s response: “There just weren’t any people to bring in.”
“It was eerie,” Garza said. He remembers thinking that there should have been thousands of people being treated. But he recalls seeing only one 9/11 casualty in the place.
The injured man had been high up in one of the Twin Towers. He sprinted down the stairs until he reached a place where he could jump from the second floor.
“He had a dislocated shoulder and a broken arm,” Garza said.
Garza and two Vancouver friends, Geoff Ritchie and Steve Pettinger, had arrived in New York on Saturday, Sept. 8, and had planned to fly back home on Thursday, Sept. 13. Their travel plans were scrambled by the disaster, which is what brought Garza to the ER. He was afraid he’d be stranded in New York without his prescribed medication.
“I had planned on a certain amount of meds, plus a day or two extra,” Garza said.
After calling his local health care provider to ask about a refill, Garza was told to check with a doctor there. What? In New York City on the day after 9/11?
“Sorry,” Garza was told. “You can go to an emergency room and consult with a doctor there.”
So he did. “The doc called my doctor. It took three hours,” he said.
There was another twist to that ER visit. Ritchie has a dark red birthmark, called a port wine stain, on the right side of his face. When Ritchie walked into the emergency department with his friend, “they thought he was a victim” of the towers’ collapse, Garza said.
After a brief explanation, “we laughed it off,” Garza said.
The friends have a few keepsakes from their visit, including a photograph taken when they had breakfast on Sept. 9, 2001, at the restaurant atop the World Trade Center.
Their waitress took the photo. Both men still wonder if she was working the breakfast shift two days later.
They had figured out a sightseeing itinerary for Sept. 11, a plan that would have put them much closer to Ground Zero that morning. Their plans fell through.
“I wanted to sleep in,” Ritchie said.
When the scope of the disaster became apparent, they called Geoff’s parents in Vancouver, Bill and Betty Ritchie.
“When the phone rings at 5:45 a.m., you think there has been some kind of disaster,” Betty Ritchie said.
… Which made the next thing she heard seem pretty weird: “Are you watching TV?”
She replied: “Of course not!”
When they finally left on Saturday, Sept. 15, some ripples of 9/11 came home with them.
During a 2003 vacation, Garza got on the elevator of a Dallas skyscraper.
“I made it as far as the 26th floor,” Garza said. “It took me four years before I could go to the top of a tall building.”
