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September 11 - Late night visit saves emergency physician

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Stanford emergency physician Heather Ross, stayed up late on Sept. 10 at her parents' New York home. In the morning, Sept. 11, she overslept and missed her 8 a.m. plane - United Airlines Flight 93. The airliner, originally destined for San Francisco, crashed in rural Pennsylvania after a terrorist hijacking.

Ross had gone back east to attend a friend's wedding two days before and had taken the opportunity to spend time with her parents, who live in Rockland County, about 20 miles north of New York.

"We were so excited seeing each other that we talked until 2 in the morning." When her Dad tried to wake her up, "I said, 'The heck with it, I'm not going to take that flight,' " she recalled in a phone interview from New York two days later.

Ross, who is a flight surgeon for United, watched the World Trade Center attack on television, not realizing at the time that the flight she'd missed was in jeopardy.

"I saw the plane fly into the World Trade Center and I was horrified. I was very scared for all the people who were in the air at that point because there were flights missing," she said. Her husband, John Ogle, also a staff physician in the emergency department, said he became increasingly agitated as he watched TV news reports from the couple's Palo Alto home and "realized the unthinkable might have occurred." When reports indicated that one of the hijacked flights was United Flight 93, he said his emotions reached panic levels.

While he was frantically trying to look up the phone number for his wife's parents in New York, Ross called and reassured Ogle that she was OK.

"It was very weird. He's a pretty tough guy. He's in the California Air National Guard. This guy jumps from airplanes. He told me, 'I've been to the Gulf War and I wasn't nervous then, but I was nervous because I thought you were on that flight.'"