I Remember 9/11 - The 25th Anniversary of the Attacks

 

Photo by Andrea Booher

In September 2001, we were living in Castle Rock, Colorado. We'd just bought our first house two months before, and Steven was working overnight as a Field Engineer for General Dynamics. Maya was just over two years old, and she liked slow and leisurely mornings. The three of us were lounging in bed when our phone rang.

Steven answered the call in the kitchen. Judi, my mother-in-law, was on the other end of the line. Before Maya and I could talk ourselves into getting out of bed, Steven had hung up with his mom and was rushing back into the bedroom.

I didn't think I'd heard him right when he told me a plane had crashed into one of the twin towers. I remember asking him to repeat himself, and by this time, he'd turned on the television that was sitting in our room. I watched the smoke lift into the sky in a thick rolling plume from the wound in the building. I remember thinking about some of the reasons why something like this might happen. Everything came up either a mechanical malfunction with the plane or a medical emergency for a pilot. The truth of the matter never entered my mind.

I moved forward with our day. I couldn't have imagined that there was more to come. I got Maya fed, which only took a few minutes. She was wild about Nutri-Grain bars at the time and could eat one in record time. We were upstairs getting her dressed when I heard Steven yell from below us. I left Maya sitting on the floor in her pale green room with bees stenciled around the walls. There was a Winnie the Pooh comforter on her bed, and a small blue and green wooden table with a tray holding a plastic tea pot and four small cups. Getting dressed hadn't taken long, either, and she'd gone and pulled a dozen books off the shelves and was happily flipping through pages, her little voice quiet and breathy as she "read" the book in her lap out loud.

I ran down the stairs just in time to see a replay of a second plane flying into the South Tower. This was no accident. There were no health issues. The planes were strong and solid. Someone had done this on purpose.

Less than an hour later, we watched the South Tower crumble in slow motion. It was unbelievable to watch something so big, so tall lose its place towering over the city to wind up nothing more than a pile of rubble and clouds of smoke. Just a few minutes later, passengers aboard Flight 93 launched a counterattack on the four hijackers who had taken over the United Airlines plane. Two instigators of the attack claimed later that the target had been the U.S. Capitol building. It never made it. The plane crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, about 130 miles northwest of the capital.

We continued to watch replays of both planes while Steven filled me in about Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon. I was stunned. Four planes. One ear was listening to the television while the other ear was listening for Maya. Steven and I just sat at the end of our bed staring at the screen. It was dreamlike. Neither one of us could wrap our heads around what had happened. It didn't even feel real.

At 10:28, we watched the North Tower fall. The sky in New York City was gray and gritty, filled with smoke and debris. The completion of those towers took place in 1972. They'd stood for twenty-nine years, which, at that point in time, consisted of my entire life. I'd never seen a photo or a film of the city without them. Then they were gone. 2,977 people lost their lives on that otherwise ordinary Tuesday. Thousands more were injured.

We didn't know anyone who was killed that day, but we mourned them all. The mood in our home was unusually somber after hearing the news. Both Steven and I had heads filled with our own thoughts. Perhaps it was our shift in mood that affected Maya, because later that day, she fell down the stairs from the top down to the bottom. We hadn't had stairs in our previous house, but she'd been up and down this flight every day since we moved in. Fortunately, she wasn't hurt, but it really scared her dad and I. Along with everything else I think about when this anniversary hits, I remember that fall.  

It happened twenty-five years ago, and yet it feels like it was yesterday.  

Why Do I Write So Many Book Reviews???

I've always been a reader. Books are pretty much the first things I can remember about my life. Dr. Seuss was a big deal. I remember the ABC Book. It was white. The A was red, the B was green and the C was blue. There were three strange creatures playing around the letters, and I loved that book. Big A, little A, what begins with a? Aunt Annie's alligator. A … a … A. Perhaps my favorite was Big M, little M … Many mumbling mice are making midnight music in the moonlight ... mighty nice.

It wasn't just the ABC Book. My childhood library was filled with Dr. Seuss, including Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, and the crazy tongue twister that is Fox in Socks. One of my most beloved childhood books was The Monster at the End of This Book. Grover. Who doesn't love Grover?

I was an only child for some time. I remember being read to, but I also had to entertain myself a lot. One of the things I liked doing was pulling out my clunky hard plastic turntable—the cover was a boring beige color—and sifting through my collection of Disney Read-Alongs. 

"This is a Disneyland original Little Long-Playing Record, and I am your story reader. I am going to begin now to read the story of [insert title here]. You can read along with me in your book. You will know it's time to turn the page when Tinker Bell rings her little bells like this: (sound of 'chimes' ringing). Let's begin now."

I remember having Cinderella, Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, Pete's Dragon, and my favorite, Alice in Wonderland. I had such a love affair with this story that I wanted an Alice themed cake for my fifth birthday.

Then I went to school and was introduced to the Bookmobile and the Scholastic Book Fair. Oh, my goodness, the Bookmobile. This was a really big deal for my little book loving heart. My mom would tuck a ten-dollar bill in my pocket, and when I stepped inside that big bus, I was in heaven. I would study all the photos of all the books and stickers coloring the newsprint sheets that were handed out in school from Scholastic. I remember getting those every few months, and I would take my money into my teacher and couldn't wait for her to pull out the great big box weeks later and hand out all the goodies my classmates and I ordered.

Books. Seriously. Is there anything better than books?

I read a lot, but I also wrote. In middle school, I began writing short stories and poetry. I asked for a typewriter one Christmas. You could buy little plastic discs that gave you different fonts. I had the standard type font, but I could switch it to italics. That was cool, but you could also buy typewriter ribbon in different colors.

What? I could type poetry in blue italics! My life was complete! 

Then I wrote my first book. Before I'd even finished it, it was well over 600 pages. I began trying to shop it around to publishing houses. This was in the late 90s, and I didn't have tools at my disposal like the internet. I spent hours sitting in the library scribbling down names and addresses of houses that might be interested in my very long family drama. Because the books that had this information in them were in the research section, I was not allowed to check them out. This is what we call determination.

I wrote so many query letters, and many houses requested I send ten pages, a chapter, the first three chapters. And so, I printed what was requested, and I spent money in postage to send it to them. I got a lot of responses back. No one wanted to publish the book, but one literary agent who read it gave me a lot of very helpful feedback. To this day, I'm grateful for what he wrote to me. (Mark Sullivan, you are awesome. Thank you!) I had a stack of rejection letters and to be honest, it took the wind out of my sails. I didn't finish the book. I wound up putting the project to the side after my husband and I had our first child. And then we had child number two. We'd always planned to homeschool, so I jumped into that with both feet. I made myself a promise that I would finish the book someday, and even if it never got published, at least I could say I completed it. I could say I wrote a book.

The list of authors I enjoyed reading was long. In my freshman year of high school, an English teacher I absolutely loved had us read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I was blown away by this book. I loved it so much that for a long time, I reread it yearly. Then, when life happened, and things got rough, I would pull it out again, and reading it consoled me. It's still my favorite book of all time. I also loved reading books written by Dean Koontz. (How many of you read Watchers?) I've never really been a fan of horror novels, but there were a lot of Stephen King books that I loved, too. (Delores Claiborne for example.) I loved mysteries and thrillers and read the Inspector Lynley series by Elizabeth George, the Kay Scarpetta books by Patricia Cornwell, the goofy Stephanie Plum books written by Janet Evanovich, and the magic realism of Sarah Addison Allen's books. James Lee Burke. Wow. I absolutely love the way James Lee Burke writes, and Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson & the Olympians series. I was reading V.C. Andrews at thirteen—yikes, but I certainly wasn't the only tween reading those books—and then there was Judy Blume. Thank God for Judy Blume. There's so many. I'll stop here, but I could keep going. Like I said before, there's nothing better than books. 

When I took on the gigantic responsibility of educating two children, I continued to read, but it was instructive books that sat on my nightstand instead of the latest Michael Crichton. I learned how to build a curriculum that suited the county we happened to live in at the time, and I even took a job with a small publication called Kids 411. I became a homeschool liaison, writing articles and sharing with other parents all the information I had gathered about being a homeschool family. (This was in 2003, and Colorado was not a big homeschool state at that time. Maya had a lot of friends she danced and did gymnastics with, and none of them were homeschooled. I was largely on my own, and I was okay with that. I was good at homeschooling. I absolutely loved being a homeschool mom.)

For many years, the authors I read came from a very different list. Sandra Boynton, Eric Carle, Audrey Wood and Laura Joffe Numeroff. I read Mary Pope Osborne, Marcus Pfister, E.B. White, C.S. Lewis and Jane Yolen. I read Room on the Broom, Sheep in a Jeep, The Mermaid's Baby, Goodnight Moon and Chrysanthemum. The kids and I would go to the library at least twice a week. They didn't have a cap on how many books could be checked out, and neither did I. I read at least four books to them at bedtime every single night. We took books with us everywhere we went just in case there was time during errands or long car rides when they got bored. I read a whole lot of books from the back seat of many cars. Children's books. They are magical.

When our oldest was about twelve, I finally finished writing that first novel. (The finished version was nowhere near 600 pages by the way.) This time, I didn't try to sell it, I published it on my own. I went through a publisher called Xlibris. They taught me a lot, but they charged a great deal of money to do so. If I had to do it over again, I would not have gone this route, but it did make it possible for me to decide to publish and then be published. That was at the end of 2012. I learned a lot that next year about the ins and outs of having a book on the market. This was when I found out how important the almighty review is.

Let me blunt. Reviews are everything. Every author needs them, and they are so very difficult to get. Sites like Amazon advertise books with a lot of reviews, and literary agents and publishing houses look at the number of reviews to gauge how popular—and how financially profitable—a certain title might become. I repeat: REVIEWS ARE EVERYTHING.

As a new author, I had no reviews. I did know how to research, though, and I found a review group on Goodreads. It turned out to be a great group. Books were grouped according to genre, and each reviewing period lasted about two months. In order to get four reviews, you had to be willing to read four books and write and post four reviews. None of the reviews were reciprocal, so I was never asked to review a book by an author who had written a review for me. There was never any crossover. They were honest reviews. (I did this for my first two books, and some of the reviews I received were awful—but they were helpful. I'd rather have an honest review and be able to learn from it than to be told a book is fantastic when it isn't.) I was part of this group for about two years, and I met a lot of great authors. I also got to read many amazing—and some not so amazing—books. I'm not in the group any longer, but it still exists thirteen years after I first discovered it.

There are a lot of authors publishing books. Some of them are traditionally published. Some of them are attached to smaller publishing houses, and some of them—like mine—are published by indie authors. The one thing every single one of these books has in common is that they all need reviews. 

I decided that if I was going to ask for reviews, I was going to write reviews.

One of the reviews I wrote that garnered the most attention was for Blow Fly by Patricia Cornwell. I never write a review hoping someone will comment on it. In fact, at the time, I didn't realize that was a thing, so the response it got took me by surprise. This book is number twelve in the Kay Scarpetta series. I had been an avid reader of this series, until I got to the twelfth book. She chose to do something with her characters that didn't sit well with me, and I was hesitant to read further. I felt guilty about this. I'd been loyal to this writer and this series, but I was struggling with it all. I decided to look at some of the reviews about this book to see what other readers were saying about it—and I was horrified by some of the things I saw.

People, specifically when they have any amount of anonymity, can be incredibly mean and rude. That's not something I believe in. I don't write mean reviews. Does this mean I give four and five stars to every book I read? Absolutely not. Does this mean there haven't been books I chose to skim quickly instead of actually reading because I found no interest in them? Nope. I won't say I thought a book was good if I didn't think it was. But I always find something I liked about a book—perhaps the author's humor, maybe a phrase or two stood out, maybe it was a character, or the premise of the story—it could be something really small, and I'll be sure to write about it. I'll say the book didn't work for me, but that I'm sure there are others who will feel differently. You can say you didn't care for something without being a jerk about it. There were a lot of people being jerks about Blow Fly.

I revisited the Kay Scarpetta series. I reread all the books, including book twelve. I'll be honest—it still hit me the same way it did the first time I read it. I sat and put my thoughts and feelings down—not just about the book, but about the other reviews it had received. I think it would be really amazing if Patricia Cornwell stumbled across my review one day. I'd love to know what she thought of it. 

I write reviews because authors need reviews. I write reviews because I, as an author, desperately need reviews. One of the cool things about it is, by sitting down and putting your ideas about a book into a single sentence or several paragraphs, you're challenging your brain to write in a different way. It's not storytelling. It's a different kind of practice. The more you write, the better you become at it. Writing reviews is a great tool for an author.

You don't have to do anything special to leave a review for an author. You read a book, you jot a few ideas about what you liked and what you didn't about the book. You may not hear a thank you, but I can guarantee that author will be grateful. Authors oftentimes pay companies to help them find people who will read their books and leave reviews. I do. I go through Booksprout. I pay a fee every year to have books listed on that site, and I offer them to readers free of charge in return for honest reviews. It doesn't cost a reader anything to have an account with Booksprout. They get free books, the author gets reviews. It's a win/win. 

There are other companies that do this as well. At the beginning of 2026, I decided I was going to start reading for NetGalley. I look for specific authors, and a lot of my favorites use NetGalley. One of the things I've come to enjoy most about reading for them, though, is finding authors that are new to me, or authors who have just written their first book. It's so cool to stumble across so many brilliant novels that I otherwise would have never found. An author I know decided to use BookSirens to help her get reviews a couple of months ago. I joined to support her, but once I was a member, I just decided to keep reading for other authors on the site. I couldn't possibly name all the companies who offer books for reviews, but I know it wouldn't take much research for anyone to find them.

Honestly, logging into NetGalley or BookSirens today gives me a similar feeling to stepping up into the Bookmobile or looking through the flyers from Scholastic back in elementary school. Do you know how many books there are just waiting to be read??? It's almost more than I can fathom. 

I read on average about three to four books a month, and I review every one of them. When I brought this blog back to life, I decided I would use it to help get the word out on the books I've been able to review. I post them on my Facebook page, as well as on Instagram. Readers are everywhere. Perhaps this post will urge one or two of them to go and find one of my books and leave a review for me. :) 

Just a Distraction

I am many things. I'm a wife and a mother. I'm a bestselling novelist. I'm an artist. I'm diabetic. I'm a reader. I'm a photographer and a Greek mythology enthusiast. I am a lover of iced chai, Duran Duran music and I'm a chronic pain sufferer. The list goes on, but I'll stop there.

Two years ago, I had a spinal cord stimulator placed in my body. What is a spinal cord stimulator?

It's a small device that's implanted under the skin. There are thin, flexible leads that are connected to the stimulator (which also contains a battery). The other ends are placed near specific nerves in the spine. The stimulator sends mild pulses through the leads to the nerves. Those pulses interrupt the pain signals on their way to the brain before they are felt. (Please check out the Boston Scientific website for more information.) Put simply, it's a distraction for the brain. 

It took me quite a while to come to the decision to go through with this. I'd gone through many surgeries by that time, but never one on my spine. I did a ton of research. A lot of people discouraged me and told me horror stories. Others claimed the stimulator simply didn't work for them. I watched videos, I read articles, I talked to my pain specialist. Most of all, I talked to my husband, Steven, who told me if I was nervous about it, there was no reason I needed to go through with it.

There's a very long and complicated story that brought us here. When the urge to write this started pushing at me, I was thinking about approaching it from a couple of different angles. I've decided not to belabor the whole thing. After all, this began a week before my sixteenth birthday. As I write this, I am fifty-five years old. That's almost forty years, and there's a lot to tell about that big chunk of time. I'll be honest; I'm not known for writing in short form. (Writing a synopsis is like hell on Earth for me. I'd much rather write a full-length novel than that little blurb on the back of the book.) I'm going to break from my norm this time. If the words chronic pain sufferer made you want to stop reading, I ask you to hang in there with me for a little longer. 

There. That's eleven years all wrapped up in one photograph. Now, here are the bullet points:

-Broke my wrist at (almost) sixteen.

-Struggled with what was diagnosed as tendonitis for nearly twenty-five years.

-Broke my wrist again (in a different place) when I was forty-one.

-In 2015 a hemi-head prosthetic was placed inside my wrist.

-In 2021 the hemi-head was removed and another prosthetic, this time a DRUJ, was put in its place.

-I had a lot of physical therapy in the second half of 2021, only to find my pain increasing.

-I had a tendon removed (I can no longer move my right pinky) in 2021.

-In November 2023, after seeing two different pain specialists, using every topical medication known to man, taking all kinds of pain killers, trying every brace and wrap I could get my hands on and becoming a physical therapy dropout, I was diagnosed with CRPS (Complex Regional Pain Syndrome).

-In May 2024, I went through a weeklong trial for a spinal cord stimulator.

-In July 2024, I had the stimulator placed.

The first time I broke it, I bounced back. Nothing could keep me off the ice. I competed, placing first in a figures competition. I was still an active member of my precision team, too. (We were the Sparklers, and we skated for the Rocky Mountain Figure Skating Club.) This was an official team photo, and my cast was just a part of it.

The second time I broke it, I was much older. We were living in Germany at the time, and I was treated at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. Two x-rays were taken, and I saw two different physicians who both decided not to cast it but to put me in a removable brace. No one knows for sure, but it's been said that this might be a big part of the chronic pain I suffer from now.

What is CRPS? 

All in all, I've had five surgeries on my wrist and two for the stimulator. I take medication for nerve pain, and I take painkillers every day. Have things changed for me since having the spinal cord stimulator? Yes. Has my pain decreased? Yes. Would I do it again? Also, yes.

Are you hanging in there so far?

Before I could go through the trial, I had to have an MRI done on my spine. If there was anything that might cause a problem with the leads being able to move from between my shoulder blades down to my hip, I wouldn't be able to do it. I'd had MRI's done on my wrist before, but this was a whole different story. They gave me a pair of headphones and piped a non-stop string of Duran Duran songs through them while I tried to be as still as possible. It was super loud. It sounded like I was in the middle of a construction site, and it was hard not to jump at some of the banging and clanging. That was an incredibly long hour. Fortunately, when it was done, my surgeon reported that I was good to go, and my first surgery date was scheduled.

When I went in for my trial, I really had no idea how the whole thing was going to work. Like I mentioned before, I had done a lot of research, but there were many details that hadn't been included. None of them were bad, it was just a lot of information. Ben, the clinical specialist from Boston Scientific who was assigned to me, came in and explained what would take place that day. Ben is awesome. He was in the operating room with me. He told me they were going to bring me out of sedation just enough that I could talk to him, answer some of his questions, then they would finish the procedure. After it was done, I couldn't recall speaking to him, but apparently, I did. When I came out of surgery, I sat with him and his laptop, and together we worked on a schedule that helped alleviate some of my pain. When he does this, what I feel is electrical stimulation. It's a little like pins and needles when your hand and fingers fall asleep, but it doesn't hurt. I felt an immediate change in the level of my pain. I don't quite know how to explain it because I wasn't pain free. I still had a lot of pain, but some of the sharp edge had been taken from it. It was softened. I was able to relax a little bit.

I knew the day I began the trial that I was going to have the stimulator placed. I was nervous about it, but as I made my way through those seven days, I became sure I wanted to go through with it. I had to keep track of my pain level throughout the day with an app on my phone. Ben expected and received daily texts from me. When the trial ended, and all the pain came rushing back, I wanted to schedule the next surgery immediately.

Immediately and insurance don't often go hand in hand. It wasn't until the end of July that everything came together. Ben was back in the operating room again—and he swears I spoke to him during this second procedure, too, but I'm just taking his word for it. Recovery was much easier for this than it was for the surgeries on my wrist. When I left the hospital that day, I had a two-inch incision between my shoulder blades, and a three-inch incision and a stimulator inserted in the back of my right hip. I had post-op pain and was sore for a couple of weeks. I had to be careful. I couldn't reach up over my head, I couldn't bend over, and I couldn't twist. I was told not to lift anything heavier than five pounds. I carried a small pillow with me to lean on in the car and on the couch until the back of my hip was no longer sore. By the first of October, I was considered healed. Sometimes I can feel a buzz in my right arm and shoulder when the schedule changes, or if I'm in a position that the leads don't like. I lift my chin when that happens and the buzz goes away. It was a very strange thing at first, but now I'm used to it.

So, why didn't I write this on the first anniversary of the surgery? Honestly, I've always been happy that I decided to get the stimulator. It has definitely lessened my pain. The thing is, CRPS changes all the time. Sometimes on a daily basis. There are symptoms I've had for years, but frequently, new ones will pop up. I text Ben regularly during the colder months. Cold is my enemy. I've seen him many times in the last two years. He's come up with different schedules, and he's tried to hit my trouble spots. It's hard to know if my pain has just increased or if the stimulator stopped working as well. I know that if I didn't have the stimulator, my pain would be much worse. It's a good thing. I've never regretted the stimulator, but it didn't seem to be bringing me as much relief as it had during that weeklong trial.

When I saw Ben at the beginning of June, he tried something different. He set up a program instead of a schedule. What's the difference?  A schedule works from 30% percent strength to 70%. It changes, never staying in one place for very long. This is a good choice of therapy for a lot of people. A program works at 50% strength all the time. It never changes. 50% doesn't sound like a lot, but for many, that consistent level of stimulation becomes too much over time, and it has to be brought down. When stimulation is too high, the affected limb becomes heavy, and pain flares. I've had two months of pretty decent relief since Ben and I made this change. That newfound relief is what prompted me to sit down and write this all out.

The spinal cord stimulator is a tool. It's much like the pain killers I take, and the medication I use to help me with the nerve damage I've suffered. It's like the lidocaine cream I layer beneath the THC/CBD salve I cover my fingers, wrist and lower arm with every day. It's like the soft wraps and compression gloves I wear, or the million and one heat sources I have scattered throughout my house. It's like the furry, warm mittens I carry in my bag year-round, and the sling I hang around my neck when my wrist and fingers feel overworked and completely useless. The spinal cord stimulator, like all these other things, is a tool, not a cure. Most people with CRPS—not all, but most—never go into remission. Oftentimes, CRPS continues to worsen over time, so the things I use to mute some of my pain today won't work a week or a month from now. One day, a particular brace supports the way I need it to, but when I put it on three days later, it hurts and I can't wear it. I'm super sensitive to weather. Barometric pressure affects me in a huge way and not much helps my pain when this happens—not even this change we recently made with my stimulator. My condition, as well as my pain, are chronic. I feel it every second of every day, and nothing I've tried has yet to significantly diminish it. All these tools help.

If you or someone you love suffers from chronic pain, my first suggestion to you would be to find a pain specialist. A lot of these caregivers are RN's, and others are MD's and surgeons. I had to work with a few of them before I found a good fit. Don't forget to speak up for yourself and make sure you can communicate with the person you're working with. It wasn't until I found the doctor I'm with now that I got a diagnosis that made sense. A good pain specialist will help you with this, and they'll have suggestions for things that will help your individual needs. If they suggest a spinal cord stimulator, and you've come across this post, maybe what I've written here will shed some light on my personal experience. Hopefully, the links I've included can lead you to more information on this kind of pain relief.

Everybody's experiences are unique, and if you ask ten different people what they think about a certain thing, you'll more than likely hear ten different responses. For better or worse, now I've added mine to the mix.