The morning of 9/11, Dr. Mehmet Oz was teaching a course about mechanical hearts. The company making the heart was located on the West Coast and the man in charge of the whole program left early to fly home to California for a family event.
He never made it home. He was on United Flight 93 and was actually one of the passengers who rushed the cockpit to prevent the hijackers from flying the plane into The Pentagon. Before leaving the lecture room to head into surgery, someone reported a plane had hit The World Trade Center.
Dr. Oz continued into the operating room to perform surgery on a patient requiring aortic valve surgery. Just as he began the intricate operation, as associate reported a second plane had hit the second tower. Dr. Oz immediately ordered a blackout of any other information on the tragedy unfolding in Lower Manhattan. He remembers thinking, “We can’t be distracted. There’s only one man I can save or lose right now."
When Dr. Oz emerged from the successful surgery, the whole world had changed. Elective surgery at the hospital was cancelled. It was all hands on deck, expecting thousands of victims to arrive at the uptown hospital. But not a single patient was brought to New York Presbyterian Hospital. There were no survivors.