One afternoon in late summer, 2025, at a Telluride sidewalk cafe, secure in the protective embrace of the San Juan Mountains, Dr. Tiffany Ordoñez talked about being a first-responder during the 9/11 attack near her family's Tribeca home in New York City in the shadows of the World Trade Center. Now practicing for Basin Clinic in Naturita 24 years later, she is still unable to find a silver lining.
"There were no good stories,” she said in the interview. "I lived. I did not starve. I had enough drinking water, so my eyes could produce tears. My babies were not killed nor burned nor had their limbs severed. I had shelter. There were only two ‘bombs’ — not everyday bombs by the thousands. I had a country that could provide a sense of security that I would be rescued. Like millions of others, we survived but are forever changed. I found a supportive community in Telluride.”
On Sept. 10, 2001, she and her family returned from a Telluride vacation to their Tribeca neighborhood home with its big windows and its unobstructed view of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Her children loved watching the towers and the "Big Red Umbrella" building, the brightly lit Traveler's Insurance building. The Traveler's lights would soon be turned off apparently, so as to not be a target.
"I wonder how our lives would have changed, if we had been stranded in Telluride instead of New York City,” she said.
On Sept. 11, her husband George took their 2-year-old son Max for a walk. Dr. Ordoñez stayed at home entertaining their 6-month-old daughter Maya. Their apartment overlooked the last cobblestone street in Manhattan, a noisy pavement with heavy traffic, semi-trucks rumbling by. As she was vacuuming, she heard a “crack."
"It was just another noise you hear living in New York,” she said.
Her husband soon came back and showed her the plane-shaped hole in the tower. He left again to see how his office was doing across the street from the World Trade Center. She received a phone call from her friend in Telluride, Dr. Sharon Grundy, and from her mother, but then the phones failed and she could get no word from her husband.
She started boiling drinking water and waited a painful two hours for him to return. When he did, he told of an airplane engine a few blocks away. He kept talking about all the shoes in the street. They were the shoes that had fallen off as people ran for their lives.
"They were the 5,506 shoes of those who had died in the tower,” she said.
Their neighborhood was evacuated, but Dr. Ordoñez remained in the apartment so she would be near her station at the makeshift hospital created at Chelsea Piers. Her husband put the children to bed; then she left for work.
"I met my attending physician there, a kind man whom I respect. He was trying to resuscitate someone,” she said. “We locked eyes across the room. I will never forget the intensity and the heaviness of that look. We were healers who could not do much."
The outlying suburban hospitals waited for injured survivors, but few would be coming. All the calls for blood transfusions and personnel would soon be canceled.
Returning home, she found her friend and neighbor, with a small company in an office of the World Trade Center, had survived, descending 80 floors of stairs. The neighbor was fit and able to run down, stepping over people she knew resting or collapsed. Twenty of her employees died.
Dr. Ordoñez never saw her smile again. She would leave the neighborhood, as many did. The community would soon dissolve.
Dr. Ordoñez would not smile for a year. Her son Max would not say "airplane" for a year.
The day-to-day struggles began. The Lenox Hill Hospital where Dr. Ordoñez was a resident required a commute of two trains from Tribeca to the Upper West Side. There would be frequent subway bomb threats and anthrax scares. The lights would go out, leaving her and fellow passengers trapped underground in the pitch black. The children's nanny was often late, and all were having to brave car bomb barricades, streets strewn with asbestos, body parts, armed patrols and checkpoints.
Dr. Ordoñez went to work at the ICU to find one of the first of the anthrax patients waiting to be treated. She had two children at home. Her fellow resident was pregnant, yet there they were managing a biological warfare attack.
The air was filled with the stench of death, mercury and a thick congregation of toxins. The dust was laced with asbestos. The EPA declared the air safe.
Tribeca Violinist Marya Ursula Colombia played her violin at St. Paul's Cathedral near Ground Zero where sanctuary, food and rest was supplied for the bereaved, the first-responders and the clean-up workers. She died at the age of 63 of lung cancer, attributed to being a first-responder with World Trade Center carcinogen exposure.
Dr. Ordoñez receives an annual holiday card from the World Trade Center Health Care Program. It is written in 10 languages. She knows for sure there were many more than 10 spoken there and near Ground Zero.
On the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Dr. Ordoñez had a day off. The sun was bright. There was more light without the towers. She just wanted the memories of her kids’ childhood back.
"I took the children, then 1 and 3, to a Magnolia Cupcake place and found pastries shaped like peace signs. We rushed home when it became windy. There were many, maybe 100 — maybe 2,753 — white trash bags all floating, racing and dancing, almost playfully down the street. The three of us being together, that gave me a small feeling of peace and hope and spirituality that I so needed. It seemed the souls of the victims were saying, 'We are in a better place. Don't worry.'"
