Lying in the tunnel of a PET scan, Charlie Nash’s mind was assaulted on two fronts.
It was the morning of Sept. 11, 2015. The scan fell on a day that always brought flashbacks, painful reminders of when Nash’s New York City ambulance crew responded to the terror attacks at the World Trade Center in 2001. What made this one worse was that doctors were looking for signs of cancer, which they feared had been caused by his exposure to the toxic debris from the destroyed skyscrapers.
“[I’m] in this machine going through the worst time every year wondering if I have cancer or not,” he said. “That was bad.”
He remembers it was 8:46 a.m., the time American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower on Sept. 11, 2001. Nash always wanted to work in emergency services.