By Dr. Kate Scannell, Syndicated columnist
First Published in Print: 09/10/2011
Ten years ago, I wrote this column about doctoring throughout the week that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Most of the patients I saw had reported feeling anxious, distracted and troubled. Many were overwhelmed by anger, fear, sadness, or existential angst. Cognitive disturbances were epidemic -- trouble concentrating, thinking, and remembering.
I wrote then: "Depression's devitalizing fog cast across the lives of most patients and coworkers to varying degrees, and, on several occasions, the phrase 'Prozac nation' assumed new and prescient significance ... ."
Like many Americans, I was struggling a decade ago to find my way to "some kind of normal" through the communal haze, all the while the Twin Towers' ashes had not yet fully settled. It seemed that for days, the thick dust and debris kept falling, continually layering over what had been routine, obscuring the familiar. Everything became coated with dark surrealism.
Two days after the attack when I arrived at work, I stood hesitantly outside my office a while. I looked through the doorway at my old desk, my crammed bookshelves, my stacked medical journals, the photographs and cards from patients tacked to the walls -- and it all looked so very strange. The daily habit of my life and career felt suddenly foreign to me.
That same day, a patient told me that he felt thoroughly vindicated for not having followed my recommendation to schedule a screening colonoscopy. "After all," he said, "it could've been me in those Towers. And believe me, I would've been cursing you in my final moments knowing that I'd wasted my time having that test while an airplane took me out."
Another patient speculated that 9/11 might have cured her of her obsessive worrying about not turning off the stove whenever she left home. She explained, "I've realized that the control of my fate is way beyond me and a stove knob. I mean, when a plane can just drop out of the clear blue sky and destroy your entire life, you've got bigger things to worry about, right?"
It seemed that for many of us, life -- as we knew it -- came to a screeching halt at an unfamiliar location on 9/11. The future became suddenly iffy and wildly independent of our imagined control over it.
You questioned the life-path you had been following, now possibly threatened by a perilous ending just a few steps ahead. What was the point of another 10-hour work day in some clinic? Those U-turns on Highway 24 to re-check the stove (yet again)? And why undergo a colonoscopy searching for microscopic threats, while potent macroscopic ones lay in wait?
It was suddenly difficult to envision ourselves in the worlds we had painstakingly created for ourselves throughout our lives -- worlds we had expected to unfold continuously, seamlessly, according to plan. And in that way, we experienced a kind of "suffering" that patients often described upon receiving diagnoses of terminal illnesses. That suffering is wholly pervasive -- a distress that saturates all physical, emotional, and spiritual domains of experience -- and it is rooted in a patent inability to freely anticipate a future.
So, like such patients, we collectively suffered from our inability to envision ourselves safe and secure beyond 9/11. We experienced anxiety about disappearing from an enigmatic world that blithely continued to spin without us in it. We were forced to imagine our personal and national narratives ending abruptly and unfinished -- perhaps, even, violently.
Continuous media coverage generated our grueling awareness about the precariousness of life, reinforced by memory-searing images of planes crashing into buildings, of people jumping to solitary deaths through the Towers' fiery windows, of bloodied lives lost and grieved families weeping.
Throughout the past decade, our suffering of 9/11 has been continuously rekindled. On a daily basis, the news reports about warfare, deaths, and devastation in Afghanistan and Iraq. A simple trip on a commercial airline entails X-ray examinations of your bags and body, a stranger's hand rifling through your clothes or sweeping across your legs. Medical publications and investigative journalists newly document sicknesses and disabilities that reveal over time in first-responders to the attack, in surviving World Trade Center workers, in our service men and women returning home.
The point is that our collective suffering has had little opportunity for relief. And perhaps that is to be expected, given the degree of trauma we experienced and our active efforts to ward off more attacks.
Regardless, no one should intentionally aggravate that suffering or prolong its course for the sake of political expediency. No one in political power addressing current-day issues should callously disregard our post-9/11 national psyche, governing in a manner that further damages our capacity to hope for our future.
But that is precisely what our congressional representatives are doing by refusing to behave as trustworthy stewards of our country's future. Their self-interested, nonproductive, bipartisan bickering that passes for "legislative debate" generates grave public doubt about their ability to move the country forward.
Their dreary dysfunction progressively inflates our sense of dread and hopelessness, our anxieties about surviving to a better tomorrow.
We cannot erase 9/11 from our national psyche. But we should not have to suffer the added burden of an inept Congress that remains stuck in political positions, all the while the country yearns to move forward, to heal, to anticipate a future with hope and optimism -- that is, to suffer a little less.
Fortunately, there's a cure for Congress. But to dispense it, we're going to have to show up at the voting booths next year.
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Kate Scannell is a Bay Area physician and syndicated columnist.
© Copyright 2011, Kate Scannell