Memories of 4/19/1995 and 9/11/01

I normally don't write on this blog about my feeling or family events but this week seems to be causing a change in how I am utilizing the blog. I have read several blogs that have put out their thoughts about what they were doing on 9//11/01 and how they handled it and these past 10 years. I was angry then and I think I am still angry about it today.

I can remember how I felt in the early 1990's when traveling about in the UK we had heard that the train station on the Brighton line had a bomber! I was very glib saying that it would never happen in the US! I was soon made aware of how glib the comment had been when Ruby Ridge occurred in Idaho in 1992, then Waco in 1993, followed by the first World Trade center car bombing also in 1993. The next 10 years would show me that things could and would definitely get worse in my world.

It just seemed that the world was in a spin and that all that I had known and was comfortable with in the past had just changed in puffs of smoke. I lived in Oklahoma and we are very 'country' where I live...I didn't lock cars or doors cause no one would harm me or mine. I owned a gun but it wasn't be cause of fear in humans doing me wrong but because it was something we did 'just in case a snake or wild critter came around!' In 1995, April 19, I was a nurse in the ICU when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City, OK was bombed, that was less than 20 miles from where I live in Norman, and brought home that terrorism had most definitely come to my corner of the world. I was called to come to work and some of us got the unit ready to take in patients and some of us went to the bombing site to stabilize and ship patients. After about a half hour we were ready for an influx of patients but when none came we realized the death toll would be high, 168 died due to terrorism that day (19 were small children.) The nurses and doctors returning that day were so quiet that everyone was afraid to ask what they had done and seen. It came my turn to visit the site and the sights and sounds and smells may be burned into my brain forever and I still can't talk about it.

On May 3, 1999 my second brush with a major disaster occurred when we had a major tornado out break that killed 40 people in central Oklahoma that day, some as close as 7 miles from me. There were more then 60 tornadoes that day and more than 50 people died in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Tennessee that day. I worked ER and wished I could have been anywhere else. The injured people started rolling in and we worked for hours to get them stabilized and transported to hospitals that could handle them when we couldn't. I had worked all day and then through out the night until relief staff could come in. Once again I don't think I will ever be able to forget what happened that day and night. I held hands and cried right along with my patients when they found out their loved ones hadn't been as fortunate as they were and laughed and cheered when families were reunited.

When 9/11/01 occurred I was devastated I thought that the world had taken leave of its senses and gone even crazier! Today we have been watching the reruns of footage from that day and I hope no one ever forgets the craziness that is in the world! My heart is heavy for the families that 10 years later still hope that their love ones will come home cause nothing was ever found to prove that they died. Almost 3,000 people died in the attacks. I cry when I think of the first responders going through a plethora of problems now with their medical issues that the government and insurance companies refuse to believe came from their inhaling all dust and debris from those buildings. The non-dead victims that walk in a personal hell for the rest of their lives cause they watched friends and family die in the attacks. The children that never got to know their Mothers and Fathers due to some zealot deciding to 'show the US' they had issues with our government.

I can prepare for weather but I can't prepare for the sickness that is inherent in the religious zealots of the world. I hear some of the right wing Republicans in the USA talking their craziness in this pre-election year and I wonder if they can hear their own voices and what they are saying? They don't sound much different then the Bin Laden and zealots that caused all the deaths with the 4/29/1995 bombing or the 9/11/01 plane crashes. I am tired of hearing the politicians asking for my vote also asking me to pray to get this or that done in my state and country. I don't want religion to play into my government because I have seen what happens when governments and individuals that are run by religion are put into power and I don't want any part of that. I resent my freedoms being taken away by those people and the US Homeland Security so they can protect me from what THEY perceive as being harmful to me. I resent the loss of innocence that all the children have had to give up. Hell, I resent having to give up my own innocence in the face of all this craziness!