12/4/13 Book Review: Unmeasured Strength - WSJ.com
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BOOKSHELF A 9/11 Survivor Tells Her Story Hit by a fireball as she waited at a World Trade Center elevator bank, she ran from the lobby, her clothing on fire.
By LAURA LANDRO August 30, 2011
On the spectacular September morning when two passenger jets tore through the World Trade Center towers in a heretofore unimaginable act of terrorism, Lauren Manning happened to be in the lobby of the north tower when it was hit by the first plane. Waiting for an elevator that would take her to the 105th floor, where she worked for financial-services company Cantor Fitzgerald, Ms. Manning had heard a piercing whistle and attributed it to construction noise—but then she felt the building quake and a fireball flashed from the elevator bank like a blast from hell, engulfing her.
"Unmeasured Strength" is a gripping tale of her long fight back from a devastating injury that easily could have killed her. Though her story has been told before—in the press, in a book by her husband, and on television on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and "Today"—Ms. Manning's own account, arriving in time for the 10th anniversary of 9/11, goes beyond those tributes to her courage. Her graphic descriptions of the physical ordeal of a burn victim may churn the stomach, but she has valuable lessons to impart about the personal challenges of overcoming physical and emotional adversity.
Ms. Manning says she grew up a tomboy in a New Jersey suburb—her mother was a homemaker and her father a business executive and a former Marine who fought in Korea. By September 2001, Ms. Manning was well along in a Wall Street career and had been married to her second husband, Greg, for 18 months; Tyler was 10½ months old. But the young marriage was already under strain as the couple clashed over Greg's plans to leave a good job on Wall Street and return to a career in journalism. Coincidentally, Greg was scheduled to be at a breakfast event at the Windows on the World restaurant in the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11 but skipped it to help a neighbor who had undergone a recent surgery.
As Ms. Manning recounts in "Unmeasured Strength," she has her own Good Samaritan that day when the planes hit. After she runs, in flames, out of the building lobby and throws herself on a patch of grass, a stranger covers her with his jacket to put out the fire. Agonizing minutes pass before he spots an ambulance and helps her inside. The ambulance takes her to St. Vincent's Hospital in lower Manhattan. Greg learns she is there and rushes to her side—soon proving himself the most steadfast of partners despite their earlier troubles.
Nearly mad with pain and anger, Ms. Manning remains conscious enough to discern that St. Vincent's doesn't have the resources she needs; she demands to be taken to Weill Cornell Medical Center's burn unit. online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424053111903596904576518572360386658#printMode 1/3 12/4/13 Book Review: Unmeasured Strength - WSJ.com The burns cover 82% of her body—which, she is told, works out to an 18% chance of survival—and she faces deadly threats from infection and other complications. Her existence soon becomes a haze of pain, skin grafts, surgeries and other treatments to clean and debride her wounds that are so invasive she must be put in a coma from which she doesn't fully wake for weeks.
Heavy sedation has the benefit of removing patients from the experience of trauma but it can play havoc with the mind. Ms. Manning hallucinates a nightmarish dreamscape where she flees a dark presence again and again only to end up on a cliff's edge and is cast off by an invisible force. When she comes back to consciousness, she makes a horrifying discovery after her bandages slip. "I saw a graft of cadaver skin on my left hand that resembled a slab of raw meat. Metal pins that had been placed in the joints to stabilize them protrude like silver nails shot from a nail gun." But she is perceptibly on the mend. Pumped with thousands of liquid calories daily to boost her body's healing ability, she feels "nirvana" at her first taste of food—Jell-O—and triumph when Unmeasured Strength she can stand and bend over to pick up a dropped object. By Lauren Manning Her parents are there to help her regain basic skills they (Henry Holt, 252 pages, $25) taught her as an infant—sitting, standing up and taking her first steps. She recalls parental lessons from childhood: Face every crisis with focus and determination; get to work on solving the problem in front of you.
It is weeks before she learns what happened on 9/11 and hears the news that hundreds of her colleagues and friends at Cantor Fitzgerald are dead. She vows to be an avenging angel, declaring: "I'm going to get those bastards." But she knows she has to leave that task to others, like the American F-15E fighter pilots who fly a combat mission in Afghanistan six weeks after the terror attack with a missile inscribed "For: Lauren + Greg." She finds her own mission: Since she is one of a handful at the World Trade Center injured in the attack and not killed outright—who can forget all the New Yorkers lined up to donate blood that night but finding few takers?—she vows to survive and prevail for those who didn't make it. "Now I understood that I was indeed fighting a war while I lay there cloaked in bandages."
Ms. Manning turns to the scrappy skills she learned on Wall Street to power through recovery, gathering a team of therapists, nurses and doctors to exercise her atrophied and tightened muscles and regain strength. Though she has trepidation about letting her son see her covered in bandages, she knows that she must reconnect with him, and Tyler soon becomes a frequent presence, using her physical-therapy center as an occasional playroom.
An attractive woman who was nonetheless always slightly insecure about her looks, Ms. Manning is aghast when she sees herself in a mirror: Her face is scarred, most of her left ear is missing and the grafted skin on her body is painful and ugly. The thought of venturing out into the world fills her with dread. But she learns to disregard the stares and ignore what she can't change—and with time, perseverance and treatment she is soon recognizable as herself. "All of us have been wounded in some way, whether by violence, disease or online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424053111903596904576518572360386658#printMode 2/3 12/4/13 Book Review: Unmeasured Strength - WSJ.com other personal tragedy" she writes. "But though we can never pretend we have not been touched by adversity, we can refuse to be held by it."
Ms. Landro writes The Informed Patient column for the Journal.
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