'Throughout that whole day, I think we only lost eight patients'

September 11 2001 is a date with particular resonance for nurse manager Mary Lyke-Konz.

Ms Lyke-Konz, who is now at Maimonides Medical Centre at New York, was then nurse manager of around 30 nurses at the 120-bed New York Downtown Hospital, four blocks from the World Trade Center.

That day, she changed shift with her night nurse manager, Jackie, at 8am, and the two were outside when the first plane crashed. “It was the loudest noise I remember hearing, ever. And in the middle of Manhattan, we are used to noise.

“The car alarms went off, and the birds flew away. We stopped talking and looked at each other and knew we had to get the ER ready.”

Although she doesn’t recall doing it, she called a code yellow - the hospital’s disaster plan. “We used to talk about it, then half an hour later we’d joke it could happen, and we’d do a drill. But one nurse told me he saw my face that day and just knew it was for real.”

She moved everyone out of the ER, set up a critical area of five beds, made the rest of the ER a yellow zone for fractures and dislocations, then turned the cafeteria into a green zone for the walking wounded.

“Each patient was met in the ambulance bay by a doctor and a nurse, and they were escorted to the area where they were treated,” she says.

To begin with, Ms Lyke-Konz was one of six nurses. Soon, everyone who could get back to work did.

“Nurses came back on beer trucks and news vehicles. The ER was flooded with staff from other floors. It became quite hard to treat patients because there were too many people around so I set up an area from where I could fetch people when they were needed.”

Within the first 2-3 hours, the hospital had seen more than 300 patients - three times the usual daily number.

“We had our own generator for power, but something in the World Trade Center controlled our computers, so registered people by hand,” she says.

Patients started arriving 10 minutes after the plane hit. “The first was degloved from her buttocks to her heels. We didn’t have a trauma centre, so we used up virtually all our supplies on her. We had to send out for more,” she says. “Her injuries were so bad we considered amputation, but our vascular surgeon insisted we gave the bleeding a chance to stop. She kept her legs.”

The stories are all the more remarkable given the teams did not have specialist trauma surgeons or experience.

“Throughout that whole day, I think we only lost eight patients,” Ms Lyke-Konz says.

“Sometimes we couldn’t save people. We lifted one man onto a trolley and brain matter fell out. We weren’t used to seeing that.

“We thought one patient was an African-American gentleman, but only realised she was a white woman when we removed her pants. She was that badly burned.”

One of Ms Lyke-Konz’s directors of nursing told staff about the second attack and planes hitting the Pentagon and Pennsylvania: “She was hysterical and kept saying we were all going to die. I told her not to. We had to keep working,” Ms Lyke-Konz says. She sent runners to other hospitals for supplies.

She says: “A supplier was sending new stretchers to a local hospital and they were rerouted to us, surgeons came from a trauma conference downtown and vets came to wash out rescue dogs’ eyes.

“Around noon, patients stopped coming. As soon as we stabilised patients, we moved them out of the ER or to another hospital. Then, as the buildings came down, the whole of Manhattan was enveloped in dust, and we started handing masks out.

“Phones were out so, by 2pm, thousands of people started arriving to look for their relatives. There weren’t many happy endings. But I remember one man handed his baby over to our director of nursing so he could look for his wife. I saw all three of them together later.”

As Nursing Times went to press, Ms Lyke-Konz’s current hospital has taken 100 patients evacuated because of Hurricane Irene.

• » Channel 4’s 9/11 Emergency Room documentary, available on Channel 4 On Demand, tells stories of the emergency services.

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