The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘I cherish life every day’
A physician’s assistant helped others after the Pentagon attack
When Maryann Ramos arrived for work on Sept. 11, 2001, it seemed like any other Tuesday. At the time, she was working at the Pentagon in a civilian role as a physician’s assistant. It was a beautiful day, and Ramos had biked the four miles to work from her home in Arlington, Va.
She had started doing physical exams at 7:30 a.m., and her attention was focused on a meeting in Alexandria at 10 a.m. She thought about catching the
Metro early enough to get there on time.
Ramos, who now lives in Greenwich, still gets emotional when she talks about the terror attacks two decades ago that brought down the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon.
“It’s very hard to think back to this,” Ramos said in an interview with Hearst Connecticut Media. “Sometimes I can’t even talk about it. It was so intense and so horrifying. But it was amazing that we were able to take care of people.”
On that morning, she was “ready to leave to go to my meeting and someone said, ‘You’d better go look at the TV,’ ” she said. “It was just after 9 a.m., and I saw one plane hit the World Trade Center.
“I knew that area very well: I was born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx. I once worked right down the street from it. I had even been in the World Trade Center six months earlier for a party at Windows on the World,” Ramos said of the
restaurant on the top floor of the North Tower. “I saw the second plane hit on TV, and I did not put two and two together yet.”
Rattled but focused on her work, Ramos said she headed for the Metro and was nearly at the entrance when she heard a thud.
“I’m from New York and you hear thuds all the time,” she said. “There were cranes putting new steel in at the time, and I thought it had made that noise, which had resonated. No one else thought anything of it.”
But as she waited for the Metro, “they closed the whole place down,” Ramos said.
“They told us to get out of the Metro, and when we walked out, I could see the smoke coming from the opposite end of the Pentagon across from us,” she said. “It was big, black smoke that was gray on the outside. I didn’t know at first it was another plane. I thought it had been a bomb.”
Ramos was in street clothes but she had her Pentagon ID and convinced security that she could, with her medical training, be helpful inside. She quickly went to work at a triage site set up for workers who needed medical attention.
“One woman had no blouse on her back because it had been burned off,” Ramos said. “Her skirt was OK, but her leg below the skirt had all the skin burned off. She must have been in the blowback. She was completely dazed, and I led her to ambulance right away.”
The woman died two days later. She remembers that ambulances were arriving at the Pentagon “from all over,” she said. “There were no calls. They just came.” Ramos said she also saw a piece of the plane’s cabin on the ground.
She also recalled seeing a firefighter to whom she had given a physical exam recently and he asked her to call his mother in Ohio to let her know he was all right.
His fire engine had turned pink from the blowback, which seared off the red paint, Ramos said. He had survived by jumping under a nearby pickup truck, she said. He had suffered a fractured shoulder but didn’t realize it until the next day because of the adrenaline, Ramos said.
While working, Ramos was photographed by U.S. Medicine magazine as she helped an Army official put on an oxygen mask. The image ended up on the cover of the January 2002 edition.
For hours, she worked at the triage scene with Army nurses until she was relieved at nearly 6 p.m.
“I finally got home to my husband, and he was crying because people had called from New York to see if I was still alive,” Ramos said. “I realized then that I could have been killed if I hadn’t been on the other end of the building.”
She went back the next day to help as the fire continued to burn from the plane crash. She also helped to treat co-workers at the Pentagon for anthrax exposure.
Upon retiring from the Pentagon in 2008, Ramos was given the Civilian Superior Performance medal for sending the most people for treatment of post traumatic stress disorder. She was also given an angel figure in a red, white and blue blouse by a patient who called her “the angel of the Pentagon.”
“I’ve thought of life differently after that day,” Ramos said. “I still can’t believe after 20 years someone could do something so heinous. … I cherish life every day now because of this.”