Author Patti Sonntag took this photo on Sept. 11, 2001, while walking with the doctors to Ground Zero after debris made it impossible to get closer to the site in an ambulance.PATTI SONNTAG
Patti Sonntag is an investigative data journalist based in Montreal and a dual Canadian-American citizen. Her collaborative investigations with journalism students have twice been nominated for the Michener Award.
I’m a living casualty of 9/11. I carry a cancer linked to the toxic dust at Ground Zero.
I learned this last December, when my surgeon struggled to share the news that a medical scan had detected retroperitoneal liposarcoma, a rare, slow-growing cancer deep in my abdomen.
In February, I underwent what is sometimes called a “compartmentectomy.” My surgeons could not be sure where the cancer ended, so they opened my abdomen, drew the best line they could around the tumour and the organs it had touched, then removed everything within that boundary.
The World Trade Center Health Program (WTCHP), a U.S. federal health care program, has since certified that my sarcoma is related to 9/11.
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On Sept. 11, 2001, as a Canadian student beginning graduate studies in New York, I worked amid the ash and smoke, taking notes for doctors at an emergency field hospital at Ground Zero.
On that day, as casualty counts grew and people from 93 countries, including 24 Canadians, were found among the dead, much of the world rushed to the United States’ aid. In the years that followed, 50 countries contributed troops to the war in Afghanistan. Canada lost 158 soldiers and seven civilians there.
But in the U.S., my adopted country, the wound of 9/11 runs so deep that the costs borne by its allies are often forgotten.
The pathology report from my surgery shows part of the tally: a tumour stretching from my pelvis to my navel, a few internal organs or parts of them, some of the left psoas muscle and other tissues.
During the long nights in the hospital, as I waited for my abdomen to knit under an impossibly long zipper of staples, I watched the U.S. turn away from one of its closest friends, sparring with Canada over trade and Canadian sovereignty.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration enforced new conditions on federal funding for some of his country’s top universities, including Columbia University, the school I attended. Fewer student visas were issued, narrowing the path I had taken to study in the United States.
I remembered a different time, when my two countries were good neighbours.
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After I saw the South Tower fall on TV at my student residence on the Upper West Side, I grabbed a first-aid kit and ran down to the street. Broadway, my route south, was lined with parents trying to hail taxis and go find their children. I began running toward the tower of smoke.
That decision changed my life.
But I never would have done anything different. I’m from Fernie, B.C., a small town where helping a neighbour is second nature. I’d been a wildfire worker and tree planter, with enough first-aid training to think I could be useful.
The trip was nearly 10 kilometres. Farther south, a taxi carried me part of the way, then stopped amid the tide of New Yorkers fleeing the destruction.
I kept running toward it.
At Chelsea Piers I met a UN battlefield medical-support specialist who was taking a team of doctors and nurses to the site. He asked me to take notes for them.
An ambulance dropped us a few blocks from the smoking sea of metal and torn concrete. We walked in through the dust. The grey air scraped our lungs and skin.
The medical workers washed out exhausted searchers’ eyes and administered oxygen to them at an emergency station set up beside the rubble. I wrote down their names.
A list written by Ms. Sonntag on the afternoon of 9/11, with the names of the medical workers she travelled with in the ambulance that took them from Chelsea Piers to Ground Zero.
No survivors were pulled from the wreckage and brought to us while I was there. As night fell, the doctor who had taken charge sent me home.
Walking north, I passed restaurant workers giving away food. The taxi driver who transported me the last few kilometres home refused my money.
Within days, hundreds of Canadian firefighters, Red Cross workers, ironworkers and police officers crossed the border, bringing their equipment and skills.
Since then, tens of thousands of survivors, emergency responders and volunteers have developed 9/11-related health conditions.
This year, I officially became one of the wounded.
While I was preparing for the surgery in February and researching the care available through the WTCHP, medical workers I’d met at Ground Zero sent their support.
“We’re connected forever,” said Gina Piazza, now an emergency medicine specialist in Washington. We were all, she said, “like-minded people who went toward the danger.”
In September, 2001, I wrote a piece for The Globe and Mail describing the medical workers’ long wait for patients who never arrived. I rarely spoke about that day afterward. I didn’t want to steal valour from others who gave far more.
When classes resumed after 9/11, I wore the same shirt and jeans I’d worn to Ground Zero. I didn’t have many other options.
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For weeks afterward, despite laundering and showering, it felt like shards from the soot were somehow embedded in my skin. I developed a cough. My eyes were often irritated.
I brushed it off. I finished my studies, then moved to an internship at The New Yorker and a job in The New York Times’ News Services division, trying to find my way in those exclusive circles.
My background became a source of dinner-party anecdotes: planting in the Yukon, my brother’s bow-hunting skills, how to slow-roast venison with bacon and horseradish.
When I could, I tried to crack a few doors open behind me, opening a centre that helped Canadian journalism students develop investigative skills.
My body slowly began to give out. My back began to ache in new places, digestive problems developed, then stranger symptoms emerged. In 2011, I started having some trouble lifting my left foot.
I never connected my health problems with Ground Zero. For years, doctors in New York and Montreal couldn’t find the cause.
In 2021, I went on long-term medical leave. By then I hardly recognized myself. No diagnosis was found. I returned to work.
When the cancer was discovered, nearly 25 years after 9/11, I finally understood what had happened that day. The doctors and emergency workers at Ground Zero had been the patients all along.
And I was one of them. My rare cancer is more often found among 9/11 survivors.
In the storm of doctoring that followed, my medical team uncovered and treated other conditions that had clouded the diagnosis.
Now, as a dual citizen, I am dependent on both Canada and the U.S. at a time when the relationship is fraying.
As a Canadian, I’m reliant on Quebec’s health care system, along with my husband’s income and our savings. My doctors will monitor for a recurrence of the cancer for the rest of my life.
As an American, the WTCHP’s medical team examines me every year. My application to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund will take another year or more, with the outcome uncertain.
The bond between the two countries is now written into the long scar running down my body.
As for me, I’m curious about what this new version of myself will be able to do. I still have some things I want to say.
When I look back at my younger self running down Broadway on Sept. 11, I don’t wish I’d turned around.
I think: Run faster.