Nursing at ground zero: experiences during and after September 11 World Trade Center attack

The purpose of this study is to discover shared perceptions, feelings, and common experiences of nurses after the September 11th World Trade Center terrorist attack through interpretive analysis of narrative stories of seventeen nurses. Six themes and one constitutive pattern describe the experiences: (a) Loss of a symbol and regaining new meaning, (b) Disaster without patients, (c) Coordinating with and without organizations, (d) Rediscovering the pride in nursing, (e) Traumatic Stress, and (f) Preparing for the future. The constitutive pattern is that nursing enables a humanitarian disaster response.