The Nurses of September 11th

There's a photograph from the morning of September 11, 2001, taken outside St. Vincent Hospital in Greenwich Village, the closest major medical center to the World Trade Center.

And it shows gurneys, rows of them, lined up on the sidewalk on 7th Avenue.

Doctors, nurses, and scrubs standing beside them, gloved and ready.

Every emergency room is cleared.

Extra treatment areas are set up.

Teams waiting outside for the ambulances.

And the gurneys stayed empty.

That photograph is one of the most painful images in the history of American medicine.

Not because of what it shows, but because of what it doesn't.

Today? Today is September 11th, 2026.

25 years.

Most of you, or many of you listening, weren't even born yet, or were just babies.

So today, I'm not going to share any study tips, no advice, I'm not going to give you anything to sign up for, nothing like that.

Just some stories that belong to you.

Because they belong to this profession of nursing, and this profession now belongs to you.

So let me tell you what that morning looked like from inside the actual hospitals.