My September 11, 2001

Wow, I can’t believe that this isn’t documented anywhere on my blog. Weird.

In September of 2001, I was dating a wonderful woman who lived in England who would later become my wife (and then later, my ex-wife, though I hate that term as it seems to carry a negative connotation which is not at all apropos in our case). We had met on a Buffy The Vampire Slayer message board (which is a whole other story unto itself) and pretty immediately felt a connection like we’d never felt before. Several other people on this message board had ended up dating (and eventually getting married), and I think we were both sort of in the camp of “Hey, more power to you, although I don’t really see how you can know someone well enough on the internet to fall for them.” Then it happened to us and we were like “Ohhhh, that’s how that happens.” Jess came over for her first in person visit on September 9, 2001.

Two days later, we were getting ready to go to my job where she was going to spend the day with me and meet my co-workers. We had been in the shower and she had got out to get dressed and such while I stayed in to shave. I heard a disturbing “thud” noise and I pulled back the shower curtain to see Jess on the bathroom floor. Beside her were two of her teeth, knocked clean out roots and all and little bit of blood. I leapt out of the shower, in a slight panic. After a moment she was conscious and lucid but unaware of what exactly had just happened. I thought that maybe I should keep her from looking in the mirror in case that sent her into a panic, but she got up and looked at herself missing two teeth and with two more barely hanging in there and I think she just laughed. I had already called an ambulance, so I grabbed some of my sweats and got her dressed.

The medics arrived and got her onto the ambulance, and I climbed into the front of the ambulance for the ride to the hospital. That’s when I heard something on the radio about planes and the World Trade Center. I asked the ambulance driver what that was about, and he said “Oh you haven’t heard?” He explained the situation and we went to the hospital where they tended to Jess’s split bottom lip (stitches, I think) and told us we would then have to go to an oral surgeon to see about the teeth (I had kept the two other teeth in a container of milk, as I was instructed in case they could save them). I asked her if she wanted me to call her parents but she said she wanted to wait until she could actually speak to them herself so as not to cause more worry than necessary. Someone from the hospital took me home to get my truck and while I was there I finished shaving, since thus far, I’d been wandering around with a 1/3 shaved face. I returned and watched the news updates with everyone else in the waiting room.

They released Jess and I took her to the oral surgeon who removed the other two teeth which were barely hanging on anyway. They gave her some lovely drugs as well. When we finally got home that night, she called her parents. Of course, they immediately jumped straight to “We’ve been watching what’s been happening over there!” to which Jess replied “Yes, but there’s something else I have to tell you about…”

She spent the next two weeks meeting my friends and family with no top four teeth and making jokes about how she lost them. That day will always be very memorable for very personal reasons as well as the reasons that the rest of the world will remember it. They never figured out why she fainted. The best guess was a combinations of jetlag, not having eaten since the night before and the hot shower. We later figured out that she passed out right about the same time that first plane hit. I think she “felt a disturbance in the force.”