History

"My supervisor thought a small jet plane might have nipped us. We had no idea what was going on. I began to panic. They tried to calm me down, told me to relax, take deep breaths, but the way the building was shaking, I couldn’t sit there. You felt the building shaking, you heard the explosion, you saw chairs coming out the windows, office supplies, what I know now were people"

Borders scrambled down the main staircase of the north tower, which by now was packed with hundreds of people trying to escape, many of them screaming. She passed many injured people, some with shards of glass and metal stuck in their flesh, others with burnt skulls. Fire officers came running up the stairs in the opposite direction, shouting: “Run, and don’t look back!”

It must have taken her about an hour to reach the bottom of the building. By the time she found her way to the exit, the south tower had been hit by the second plane and had just collapsed, at 9.59am, creating a dust cloud so large it could be detected by satellites in space. “I took chase from this cloud of dust and smoke that was following me,” Borders told the Journal. “Once it caught me it threw me on my hands and knees. Every time I inhaled my mouth filled up with it, I was choking. I was saying to myself out loud, I didn’t want to die, I didn’t want to die.”

When the cloud reached her, everything went silent and dark. She couldn’t see her hands in front of her face. She was grabbed by a man without a shirt and dragged into the lobby of a nearby building and into safety. There Stan Honda, a freelance photographer working for AFP, was also sheltering from the giant cloud of debris, snapping pictures of people as they came in.

Somehow, Borders managed to walk to the tip of Manhattan and make her way home on a ferry. Mechelle Taylor, who was living in the same apartment building at the time, vividly remembers her getting out of a cab outside their home when she arrived back. She was still covered in dust.

“She was shaken up,” Taylor said. “She kept saying how grateful she was to be alive, but she was bad. She saw such awful things. People jumping from the building.”

Last week, Borders completed the first phase of her treatment, chemotherapy. She'll undergo surgery in the second phase in early December, and then undergo radiation and chemotherapy in the third and final phase, she said.

She said she has already racked up $190,000 in medical bills that she can't pay, as she has neither a job nor health insurance.

"I try not to cry - $190,000 already and I still haven't had surgery, and I still need more chemo," Borders said, in tears.

"Why can't this be over?" she said. "I'm tired. I'm just tired."

Borders said she's now at a point where she can't even afford to fill her prescription medicine bottles, and that she only gets the minimum number of pills needed to get rid of her gas, her nausea and her pain.

"I take it when needed," she said. "I can't afford to take as it's prescribed."

At one point, she wondered aloud if her cancer was related to 9/11.

"I'm saying to myself 'Did this thing ignite cancer cells in me?'" she said. "I definitely believe it because I haven't had any illnesses. I don't have high blood pressure...high cholesterol, diabetes."