You are about to read an extract from a remarkable book, Love, Greg & Lauren. It is the story of a medical miracle that seems unbelievable, but every word of it is true. Inspiring and deeply moving, it is a unique document of the will to survive. It is also, above all else, a love story…
PROLOGUE
As midnight came on September 11, 2001, I stood at my wife’s bedside in the William Randolph Hearst Burn Center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
Webs of plastic tubing fed her intravenous fluids and medications. Over the next twenty-four hours she would receive approximately twenty litres – forty-two pounds – of fluids to replace those she was losing through her wounds. She was heavily sedated and would remain in this drug induced sleep for weeks. She was on a ventilator to support her breathing; there was a feeding tube in her nose. Her body was wrapped in white gauze, and she was draped in sheets and blankets to keep her warm. At 8:48 that morning, she had been burned over 82.5 percent of her body as she entered the lobby of 1 World Trade Center.
At 8 that morning she had been a vibrant, athletic, and beautiful woman, decisive and demanding and the picture of health.
At about 8:30 she had breezed through our living room telling me how she’d solved a scheduling problem that morning, making business calls that delayed her normal departure about fifteen minutes. She lingered in the hallway, saying good-bye to our ten-month-old son, Tyler, and then she headed off to work, going downstairs and hailing a cab to take her to the World Trade Center, where she was (and is) a senior vice president, partner, and director of global data sales for Cantor Fitzgerald.
Less than twenty minutes later, listening to “Imus in the Morning” program as I was about to leave for work, I heard Imus break and say, “What’s this? A plane hit the World Trade Center?”
I ran to our terrace, which looks down Manhattan’s West Street toward the twin towers, and saw a vast hole billowing black smoke from the top of Tower One. I could see that the plane had hit at or just below Cantor Fitzgerald’s offices and that the impact had been huge. I tried to persuade myself that Lauren, that anyone at Cantor, could still be alive. I kept calling her telephone numbers but her office line was busy and her cell phone wasn’t ringing. I paced the apartment, pounding the wall and calling her name, then watched as the second plane hit Tower Two, seemingly right at the 84th floor, my office at Euro Brokers.
I felt like the man on a battlefield who leaves his unit for a moment, only to look back as it is blown up before his eyes.
Friends and family kept calling our apartment to make sure we were all right. I could not say whether Lauren was alive; I was almost certain she was dead.
But she wasn’t.
Arriving at the World Trade Center, she’d heard a whistling sound, entered the lobby to investigate, and been met by an explosive fireball. She ran outside in flames. A bond salesman over at the World Financial Center saw her and two others as they ran from the building, raced across West Street, and put out the flames that were consuming her. Lauren was lucid enough to tell him her name and our phone number. People had fled and there was no one else around for blocks. As heavy pieces of steel debris fell from a thousand feet above them, he stayed with Lauren until the ambulance came.
At 9.35 our phone rang once and went silent. A moment later it rang again. A breathless voice said, “Mr Manning, I’m with your wife. She’s been badly burned but she’s going to be OK. We got her in an ambulance.” The phone cut off before he could tell me where she was being taken. I was to learn later that the caller was a bond trader. His buddy, the bond salesman, had just saved Lauren’s life.
Twenty minutes later a nurse called to tell me Lauren was at St Vincent’s Hospital, eight blocks away. Fighting tears, not knowing what to expect, I made my way there through the stunned crowds headed North on Hudson Street. At one point I turned around and saw Tower One wreathed in black smoke. I did not realise Tower Two had already come down.
I entered St Vincent’s moments before it was closed to all but patients and medical personnel. I found Lauren in a bed on the 10th Floor, all but her face covered in white sheets. She looked normal, though as if she had a deep tan, but her eyebrows had been burnt off and her beautiful blonde hair was charred.
The first thing she said to me was “Get me to a burn unit”.
Then she said “Greg, I was on fire. I ran out. I prayed to die. Then decided to live for Tyler and you”.
She asked me to apply balm to her blistered lips. Her pain grew and she begged for morphine. She became less aware. Her face began to swell. They transferred her to a private room and asked me to step out. For the next two hours the nurses dressed her wounds.
At 5 that afternoon, Dr Edmund Kwan, a plastic surgeon affiliated with St Vincent’s and New York Presbyterian, secured Lauren a bed in the Burn Centre and ordered her sedated and intubated to protect against respiratory arrest during the transport. The ambulance driver headed across 14th Street, up an FDR drive closed to all but emergency vehicles, and rolled to a stop in the hospital’s ambulance bay. Within minutes we were in the Burn Centre on the 8th floor. Lauren was wheeled to a glass-walled room and doctors and nurses surrounded her bed. Someone led me to the waiting room and I sagged into a chair.
On Thursday evening, a gray-haired man in a white coat met with us in the waiting room. He was Dr Roger Yurt, the medical director of the Burn Centre, Lauren’s doctor in the pages that follow. In a calm voice he described what she was up against. The first seventy-two hours were the resuscitation phase, during which she was receiving an extraordinary quantity of fluids to replace those her body was dumping. If she survived this phase, Dr Yurt would perform numerous grafts in the ensuing weeks to close her wounds and control her injury. Only after she was ‘closed’ would she be out of danger, until then, infection would be a constant threat. The prognosis was bleak, but the meeting with Dr Yurt brought me the first twinge of hope. If there was anyone on earth that could save her, I thought, he was the one.
In the early afternoon of Sunday, September 16, I was told that Lauren’s chances were less than 50-50, probably far less. (I was later to learn they were about 15%).
Day after day the phone at home never stopped ringing, friends, colleagues, and family from around the world. It grew difficult to repeat the full story, but I realized that the short version was becoming more than a medical summary and said nothing more about her courage.
So on the afternoon of September 19, I sat down to type an e-mail update on Lauren’s condition. I wanted to thank everyone for their prayers and their support, and to tell them how she was doing in ways that would convey just how hard she was fighting: the resolve and morale of the medical staff, the love of friends and family, the bravery that was already evident as I stood by Lauren’s bed. As a token of my faith in her, I signed both of our names at the end of that first note, and to every one that followed.
The daily e-mails became a compulsion.
From: Greg
To: Everyone
Date: Wednesday, September 19, 2001 5:30 PM
Subject: Lauren Update
First of all, I want to thank all of you, and all of the others to whom you speak about Lauren. The love that has flooded in and the prayers that are being uttered on her behalf have helped us immediately.
She is still heavily sedated due to her condition, but they say she can hear my voice, so I tell her about everyone I have spoken to, that they send their love and best wishes, and their prayers, including numerous congregations across the spiritual spectrum, both synagogues and churches around the world. I have been informed that this evening the Baptists will be added to this group.
Lauren is putting up a heck of a fight. She has been through two surgeries and continues to hold on. She has a long road in front of her, but she is hanging in there, and we are by her side constantly. As of 5PM Wednesday she remained stable.
For those of you who may not know the story, she was entering the lobby of the North Tower of the World Trade Centre when a fireball exploded from the elevator shaft. She and two others managed to run out of the building, all three of them on fire. A passerby across the street ran to them, reaching Lauren first, and put the flames out. He then put Lauren in an ambulance, so she was the first person evacuated. He certainly saved her life.
She was at St Vincent’s, where I joined her, and then at 5 PM Tuesday rode in the front of the ambulance where she was transferred to the Burn Centre at the NY Presbyterian. When I got to St Vincent’s, she told me that she had decided to live for Tyler and me; so I am taking her at her word.
Thank you for all your support and prayers.
Love
Greg & Lauren
Extract taken from Love, Greg & Lauren
Published by Pan Macmillan Australia rrp: $30.00
Available where all books are sold.
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