Where were you on 9-11-2001?

Here’s my 9-11story. I seldom think of it after nineteen years, but with all the hardships we are witnessing as a nation in the year of 2020, the visions of that day come back to my mind.

In late July of 2001, my first husband Robert Cheatham (Bobby) had a respiratory arrest.

Since January of 1997, he’d struggled with a variant of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a disease of the neuromuscular system that paralyzes. Most people who have it regain about ninety percent of their body functions, but he didn’t. He improved in tiny increments, but his condition always deteriorated. In the meantime, he developed spinal stenosis and gained a huge amount of weight from heart failure, recreational eating, and the inability to move. He was profoundly paralyzed from his diaphragm to his feet, and he had limited use of his arms.

The strangest phenomenon was that he could still play trumpet. Most of the time he played flugelhorn because it required less wind he said. (He taught trumpet and was a band director at Louisiana Tech University.)

Back to July of 2001—he was an inpatient at a rehab hospital. One morning while Fermi, a physical therapist, was working with him, I sneaked into the adjoining bath to take a shower. I heard Fermi calling me in a panicky-sounding voice. As quick as I could I threw on underwear and a tee shirt.

Bobby had stopped breathing and he had turned dusky. “I believe he’s gone,” Fermi said.

“Let’s get him in bed.”

Fermi and I lifted him from a chair and threw him over into the bed. Actually we dropped him into the bed, and he started breathing again. We turned on every call bell in the room, and I rushed out into the hall to yell for help.

The arrest resulted from a massive shower of pulmonary emboli (blood clots) in his lungs. After a couple of weeks, the doctors decided to send him to the LSU hospital in Shreveport to have a Greenfield filter installed in the inferior vena cava to catch any blood clots his body could have been manufacturing and sending to his lungs.

On the night of September 10, 2001, I followed Bobby, who rode in an ambulance to Shreveport, about seventy miles from the hospital in Ruston. He was admitted, and the following morning staff members took him downstairs to the operating room to get the Greenfield filter.

That morning I followed along behind. When I stepped into the hall, two swarms of employees hovered around the television sets on the wall. One of the twin towers had already received the blow of an airplane crashing into it. The nurse called me. “Come with us. I’ll show you where the operating room is so you can come check on him.”

After following her to the door, I returned to his hospital room, where I sat and watched the second airplane. A reporter announced that President George W. Bush was located at Barksdale Air Force Base, which is in Shreveport’s twin city, Bossier City. When the news people made this announcement, President Bush had already gone somewhere else.

As I sat in the room and watched the events of the day unfold while I waited for Bobby to have his procedure, a strange calm came over me. After all we’d endured and relied on the Lord to lead us through, I had developed a sense that God would take care of me no matter what.

The vascular surgeon stayed home that morning to watch television and was three hours late coming to work. The nurse telephoned me and apologized for the delay. She asked me to come to the operating room.

That afternoon I followed an ambulance back to Ruston. Cars were sitting in long lines at the gas stations. The world has not been the same since then. Neither was Bobby. From that day until he died in January of 2002, he never spent an hour free of pain in his legs. One theory was that he was making more clots, which were pooling in his legs and causing the pain. His physical, emotional, and mental deterioration was horrific.

Since 9-11, I have developed a kind of distance that has helped me go through whatever my life presents. I still become anxious at times, but I have a kind of assurance that things will be all right. I’ve always known, but now I know on a deeper level that when my time comes, as Job said, I shall see God.