"How Could I Forget?"

After a tragic plane crash, doctor and patient are forever connected

- Victor Fornari

THE MESSAGE CAME by email on a Friday.

"Do you remember me?" wrote the sender.

"Do I remember you?" I wrote back.

"I think of you often and fondly, although it has been over 25 years since we last spoke, and 34 years since we first met." Our first meeting: Jan. 25, 1990. It was a drizzly evening that fateful Thursday.

I was exercising on my NordicTrack when the phone rang. It was my brother.

"I heard that a plane crashed on Long Island," he said. "Are you all OK?" "We're fine," I replied. Resuming my exercise, I turned on the TV.

The news was dreadful: Avianca flight 052, a Boeing 707 from Bogota, Colombia, to New York City, had run out of fuel after a failed landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport and had crashed on Long Island's North Shore.

Soon the phone rang again.

Annoyed, I answered. It was the hospital: They had declared an emergency and wanted me to come in.

I'm a child psychiatrist, I thought.

What can I do for the crash victims? Without stopping to shower, I changed into my work clothes and told my family that I'd be back shortly.

At the hospital, I joined 200 other health-care providers. The emergency room had been evacuated; the cafeteria was now a makeshift ER, and elective patients had been sent home to make room for an unknown number of survivors. As a helicopter arrived bearing the first survivors, our anxiety grew.

As each stretcher was wheeled into the ER, it was surrounded by a nurse, a surgeon and a Spanish-speaking translator. The injured were sent for X-rays or straight to the operating room.

It went astonishingly smoothly.

As the first child came in, I went to translate and to provide emotional comfort. It was terrible to see the children frightened and in pain.