Time helps doctor to cope

Sept. 11 was about tragedy, heroism and community, the doctor says.
By IAN HILL
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- National news shows kept calling Dr. Omar Lateef, asking for interviews. Barbara Walters wanted to follow him around for a day while he worked at New York University's downtown hospital.
The Boardman native, however, said no to most of the interview requests, and no to Barbara Walters. He said he didn't want to relive his experiences as one of the first doctors called to the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
"I just wanted it to go away," Dr. Lateef said.
He also was worried that the press would turn his story into a melodrama about a doctor who acts heroically Sept. 11, only to have his faith -- Islam -- vilified a few days later.
Today, two years after the attacks, Dr. Lateef says the passage of time has helped him start to come to terms with his feelings about Sept. 11.
Yet he remains concerned about how he'll appear in the press. He stressed he doesn't think the story is about him or his faith.
The story, Dr. Lateef said, is about the tragedy, heroism and the sense of community that followed the worst terrorist attack to strike the United States.
Called to WTC site
In 2001, Dr. Lateef, now 30, was an assistant chief resident at NYU's downtown hospital, about a half-mile from the World Trade Center towers. He said he was in a lecture at the hospital with other doctors Sept. 11 when he heard the sound of the first explosion caused by a plane hitting a tower.
Two hijacked planes had crashed into the towers, which would eventually collapse. Later that morning, hijacked planes also crashed into the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., and into a field in Shanksville, Pa.
A total of about 3,000 people died in the attacks.
After the second explosion at the World Trade Center, the doctors' beepers began to sound at the NYU hospital. It was the beginning of a shift that would last nearly three days for Dr. Lateef.
He and other senior residents were first called to the towers, which had yet to collapse, to help treat victims as they fled. He said people were squeezing past one another through small doorways in an effort to get out.
Bravery of firefighters
At the same time, firefighters were trying to push their way through the fleeing crowd and into the towers.
"Everybody had their role, but at that time, I couldn't imagine a scarier, more important role [than a firefighter]," Dr. Lateef said.
He said he was a few hundred yards away from the towers when they collapsed, creating a cloud of dust that made it look as if it were snowing in lower Manhattan.
After the collapse, Dr. Lateef and other doctors continued to help the victims with the worst injuries into ambulances. They then headed back to NYU's downtown hospital.
There, the doctors, covered with dust, found between 400 and 500 new patients who needed treatment, Dr. Lateef continued. Patients who had been in the hospital before the attacks and could be moved were put in wheelchairs and wheeled by hospital staff over the Brooklyn Bridge to other hospitals.
"In medicine, I had never seen anything like it," Dr. Lateef said. "In that three-day period, my colleagues and I got more than five years' experience in doing certain things. We did critical procedures every five minutes that are typically done every two weeks."
Death and survival
The first patient Dr. Lateef had to treat was a man in his early 20s whose chest had been crushed and who later died. When he told the man's wife he was dead, she went into shock and was sent to the emergency room.
"She just starts screaming, and all she could say after that was, 'He was supposed to get milk today. I don't even have milk at home,'" he said.
Many patients were sent to surgery during the morning and afternoon of Sept. 11 and had to be watched as they recovered at night, Dr. Lateef continued. He said during the night, he and another doctor spent about six hours caring for a woman who had been through several surgeries and who doctors believed had been struck by airplane landing gear.
The woman was expecting to get married the following week; she was released from the hospital four months later.
After about three days working at the hospital, Dr. Lateef went home.
Islam under attack
In the following days and weeks, Dr. Lateef, like most Americans, watched media coverage of the aftermath of the attack and the search for the terrorist hijackers. He said he was destroyed by what he saw.
Islam was being blamed for the attacks.
"I've taken a lot of pride in my culture like anyone else, and my religion more than anything else. I happen to be a Muslim," Dr. Lateef said. "The whole world, all of a sudden, hated that faith."
It was a hate he experienced firsthand a few days after the attacks, when a patient Dr. Lateef was treating heard his name and asked for another doctor.
"I had felt as much pain as anybody else [Sept. 11], and to hear somebody say they want another doctor, that to me sort of crushed me," he said. "I was crushed by it for a long time.
"[The terrorists] didn't hijack a plane, they hijacked a religion and a culture, and I was part of that," Dr. Lateef said.
Coming to terms with tragedy
His residency ended in 2001, and he left New York City to take a fellowship at a Chicago hospital. During the following months, he tried not to think or talk about the tragedy he saw Sept. 11.
"I didn't want to talk about it for a long time," he said.
A year after the attacks, Dr. Lateef agreed to speak about his experiences at a memorial service in Chicago. While speaking, he found himself reliving many of the emotions he felt in New York the year before.
He said that since then, time has helped him deal with what he saw in New York. He added, however, that he still doesn't feel completely comfortable discussing the attacks, and that he now knows he'll never forget what happened that day.
"I can tell you every step of where I was," Dr. Lateef said.
hill@vindy.com