Illustration by Alex Chen
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I sat in my hospital gown; vulnerable and chilly, in a sparsely populated hospital waiting room with the silent televisions in the early morning. My husband sat next to me on the uncomfortable seats, holding my hand. The TVs were tuned to CNN.
Suddenly, the picture changed. “Breaking” appeared onscreen. My husband reacted, crying out as we watched a plane fly into a skyscraper in New York.
Looks like a horrible accident, said my husband.
No, I said, knowing nothing, it’s terrorism.
It was Tues., Sept. 11, 2001.
I’ve learned to love admitting I’m from Biggar, Sask.
What are you scared of, right now? asked the young anesthesiologist. He was wearing Tena sandals with socks and fidgeted with a rubber band in his left hand.
Diagnosed with cervical dysplasia after a routine Pap smear shortly before my 1984 wedding, I had tried several treatments (including cryotherapy, cautery and watch-and-wait) trying to preserve my fertility and avoid the hysterectomy I was about to have.
That I won’t wake up, I answered. Or that I’ll wake up in the middle of the operation. Or that, with this New York thing, I’ll wake up to nothing.
You won’t wake up too soon, I promise. I have a cart full of drugs to make sure that doesn’t happen. He smiled and stopped there, not addressing my fears of not waking/waking up to nothing.
In the OR, a lovely nurse cozied me up in a warm flannelette sheet. I heard a high-pitched hissing white noise and monotone sotto voce mentions of the awful thing in New York. The Scottish-born gynecological oncologist (who said my name reassuringly with a rolled R, the way my Scottish grandmother used to say it) greeted me, chatted with his team, introduced me to a resident and said we’d chat again in a few hours. I was directed to count backwards from 100 and …
Mrs. Dann. Mrs. Dann!
Somebody was shouting at me.
Mrs. Dann, it was cancer. But we got it all.
It was the resident. With the best possible news.
I like to think I had it together enough to thank him as I floated up from anesthesia’s oblivion. As I struggled to locate myself in the world, I could hear (over the hissing) nurses talking about sign-up sheets. And buses.
These ideas (Cancer gone. Planes. Volunteer to help. Health-care workers needed. Triage. Buses to New York) floated up at about the same speed as do answers from the Magic 8 Ball; the ideas appeared with the same fuzzy clarity.
My vintage Barbie’s new outfit honours my parents’ hard work
This is the best moment of my life, I realized. The world as I knew it was still here and the cancer that had been threatening me for years was gone. I was warm and safe and cared for. I still use the memory of this moment to help me re-establish equilibrium anytime I get knocked for a loop.
I had a TV in my hospital room. I also had a magic morphine button for the pain. My husband sat at my bedside, watching the TV over my head (we’re both journalists) and holding my hand. I instructed him to squeeze my hand hard and wake me up when there were new developments. The morphine button made sure I wasn’t really too aware of “new developments” until the next day. I had a largely uneventful recovery surrounded by the unspooling 9/11 story and Maeve Binchy novels.
Later, when I was able to abstractly juxtapose my joy with the hellishness that was 9/11, I had another stating-the-obvious realization: The best day of my life was one of the worst for so many and for so much of the world. I didn’t feel guilt, but rather why me? Why am I so lucky?
I worked as an obituary editor and as the world recalibrated in late 2001 and beyond, I was awed by The New York Times’ initiative to write profiles, thousands of them, for everyone who was killed on 9/11; they were later published in a single volume as Portraits of Grief, now available online.
Looking for ways to recalibrate myself, I was part of a group that raised money to buy a special puppy for the New York City Fire Department, as they’d lost search-and-rescue dogs at Ground Zero. We were sent a photo of a beautiful Labrador by the breeder; I forget the puppy’s name, but we got a thank-you letter from the canine unit.
I finally saw the Ground Zero memorial in early 2016; I’d seen the plans and photos and had been unimpressed, but the reality is something else. All those names. The cool granite. The bronze. The falling water. I found it very moving.
I wish there were an adequate way to describe the idea that the best of times for some is sometimes the worst of times for others; the term zero-sum implies that they cancel each other out, which usually isn’t the case.
It is always worth noting how human beings recognize and react to both the miraculously good and horrifically bad in the world. These reactions encapsulate the best and the worst in each of us, and give us a way to move forward, even when, initially, that might appear impossible.
Moira Dann lives in Victoria.