Where were you around 9 .00 am on September 11, 2001?

Dr. Patel started treating patients on Sept 25 1995 at his office located at 101 Pleasant street, Worcester, MA. Our office hours were 8.30 am to 5.30 pm from Monday to Friday and 8.30 am to 1.0 pm on Saturday.

For the convenience of our patients, we decided to start at 7.30 am on every Tuesday from Sept 11 2001. Dr. Patel started treating patients at 7.30 am on Tuesday 9-11-2001. At that time we did not have TV in our office. We had only radio during those days.

 
Around 8.45 am, the news started coming on radio that one of the twin tower in New York was attacked, around 9.05 am another news of attack on the another tower came on radio. Then we got more bad news about attack on Pentagon and another flight crashed in Pennsylvania. Our office came into  pin drop silence mode. All the patients were at the front desk window to listen news and everyone was in shock. Patients were coming on their appointment time. We were running behind the schedule because of the things going on that day in the news. We remembered that not a single patient question about  why we are running behind or how long they have to wait for their appointment. Phone stopped ringing once the news of attack on America  started coming out. Our telephone did not ring from 9.00 am, until around 1.30 pm, and that phone call was from scheduled patient to see if we were open.

We have one couple on that day in our office. Both of them were very sad and very happy at the same time. They told us that, they have two sons who lives in New York, One of them was working in second twin tower and was able to come out of it, but the other son had to go into twin tower as he was working as NYPD.

In the memory of our heroes we decided to continue open our office every Tuesday at 7.30 am. It's 20 years now, and we did not change our office hours for Tuesdays even though we had moved to 130 Lincoln Street, Worcester,MA. We did change office hours for other days, but not for Tuesdays.

“If we learn nothing else from this tragedy, we learn that life is short and there is no time for hate.”

—Sandy Dahl, wife of Flight 93 pilot Jason Dahl, in 2002

Author

Nikhil Patel, DMD Dentist