Remembering the stories they carry, 25 years later

Olivia Mickles, ’27, spent most of this summer in a small room in Long Island, waiting for a nurse to ask her to run more tests. 

As a research assistant with the World Trade Center Health Program, Mickles would talk to people, mostly first responders from Ground Zero on 9/11. She was assessing if they are starting to show signs of cognitive decline. 

Mickles met with patients to administer cognitive tests, like short memory and attention screenings. Many of the patients had been coming in for the same yearly checkup for decades. 

During one of those routine tests, the man sitting across the table began describing a filing closet. 

He told her that he had been a firefighter, and on Sept. 11, 2001, he was one of dozens who ran toward the second tower as everyone else ran away. He made it a few floors up before the second plane hit; the impact threw him into a filing closet, and falling debris jammed the door shut. 

Smoke filled the room until he couldn’t see his own hands, he told Mickles. 

He said he gave up, curled into a ball on the floor and waited to die. 

But he heard crying: a woman hiding under a table a few feet away. She wouldn’t stop repeating the phrase, “You’re a fireman. That’s your job. You have to save us.” 

He said he then got up and rammed a table into the wall unit until it gave way and carried the woman and another survivor out of the building on his shoulders. 

“He’s crying while he’s telling me this,” Mickles said. “And I’m saying, ‘You’re right, I can’t understand, but that’s one of the most horrible things I’ve ever heard.’”

For 10 weeks of this past summer, stories like this were part of Mickle’s job. 

A psychology major, Mickles worked as a research assistant at the World Trade Center Health Program, a joint effort between the Centers for Disease Control and Stony Brook University that provided free health care to first responders, cleanup workers and civilians affected by the Sept. 11 attacks. 

Twenty-five years after the attacks, responders and survivors are still showing the toll of that exposure. Researchers have linked it to a rare blood cancer previously seen only in Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange, as well as elevated rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic disease in the pancreas and lungs. Researchers are finding that these diseases are growing more acute as the program participants keep aging. 

“They’re at our clinic because they were involved in 9/11 to some degree, and they’re suffering some kind of illness because of it,” Mickles said. “(For) some people, it’s invisible, you would never be able to tell.”

The internship gave Mickles a sense of career direction by reminding her that everyone she sits across from carries something she can’t see. 

“You know, when you go through something really hard, you just want someone to be there and to listen, even if they can’t understand,” Mickles said. “You just want someone to know what you went through.” 

Mickles ran two tests on nearly every patient who came to the clinic every day, regardless of whether they showed signs of cognitive decline. 

“There’s actual evidence that going through severe trauma and being exposed to certain toxins could potentially prematurely age the brain,” Mickles said. “So if their scores do start declining, we send them to a neurologist.”

Between appointments, she entered the data that researchers later analyzed for patterns. 

“It was almost an emotional roller coaster every day,” Mickles said. Some patients walked in cracking jokes, others were just tired or grumpy about being at the doctor before 8 a.m. 

One of the assessment’s routine questions asks whether a patient has ever had a head injury before. Most people mention a concussion from playing sports, but one man, without much warning to her, said he’d been blown up. 

“I always feel so bad because I have to ask, ‘What happened? Can you describe the injury to me?’” Mickles said. He’d been caught in an explosion in Afghanistan.

Research coordinator Vittaleshvara Bhargava, who has worked at the program since August 2023 and worked alongside Mickles this summer, said that working with this group of patients required a special level of sensitivity. 

“Patients are often hesitant to participate in research,” Bhargava said. “Especially around cognition, a sensitive subject for a population already confronting what memory loss could mean for their independence.” 

Bhargava said Mickles approached patients’ hesitancy with more care than her role required, taking on responsibilities that are usually reserved for full-time staff. 

Interactions with patients would often lead Mickles to reflect on herself. 

When one patient asked, in a quiet conversation, for Mickles to talk a bit about herself, she told him she wanted to go into psychological research. He asked her for a favor: to remember the children. 

“No one talks about the kids of the people that experience these things,” she recalls him telling her. 

It wasn’t a request she expected. Most conversations during a cognitive test stayed within the topic of the exam, a memory prompt, a follow-up question, small talk. But this one didn’t. 

Mickles said she’s carried the request with her since. It’s also shaping which graduate programs she’s applying to, mostly doctoral programs in clinical psychology, focusing on health psychology and the intersection of physical illness and psychological distress. 

“I’m really taking it into account, if I get into one of those programs, I want to do that kind of research because of him,” Mickles said.

She also said children whose parent went to work on the morning of Sept. 11 ended up living with a changed person, someone who was likely traumatized, depressed, physically changed, or didn’t make it home that day. 

Friends say the instinct to sit with people’s hardest moments isn’t new for her. Alex Azzara, ‘27, a friend of Mickles, said people who know Mickles often realize just how emotionally intelligent she is. 

“She’s very good at knowing what she feels and how to properly express it and communicate it,” Azzara said. “She has a lot of maturity and emotional intelligence overall, and self-control. Whenever we’re talking about issues or things that arise, she just has a very calm, steady presence.” 

That’s the lesson Mickles carried out of her internship’s small room, one patient at a time. 

“Someone could greet me in the happiest way possible, look so healthy and have a devastating story or underlying condition,” Mickles said. “It truly just puts into perspective that everyone you meet, you never know what someone’s going through.”