She may not have been inside the Twin Towers on the day of the September 11, 2001 attacks, but she was just blocks away from where the harrowing events took place that day, and those events have impacted her health and her life countless times since.
Courtney Clark never considered herself a 9/11 survivor until finding out that the events that took place that day have been the cause of her reoccurring cancer. Four times since, she has been diagnosed with melanoma, and recently found out that she's one of about 30,000 people who can directly trace their cancers to 9/11 as part of the World Trade Center Health Program.
According to the program, Courtney is a 9/11 survivor. "It took almost 20 years to even realize that it was the cause of all of these other issues in my life," she shared.
Not only has she had cancer numerous times, but she also is unable to have any children of her own due to her health conditions. Courtney, who now resides in Austin, Texas, is a adoptive mother to a teenager, a consultant, speaker, and author.
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Courtney, now 44 years old, remembers arriving to work on that day 22 years ago and finding the office empty. After about five minutes, she was met by some of her colleagues who came running in to escort her to an office across the hall that had a TV.
"They were saying [on the news] a propeller plane had hit the World Trade Center," she recalls. "But the guy in the office was on the phone with his boss, who was stuck in traffic on Sixth Avenue. And she was telling him on the phone as we were there, she was telling him, 'an American Airlines plane, it flew, I saw it, it flew over me.'"
"My colleagues and I go back down on the street. And we're standing with what feels like the entirety of New York City," she said. "Everybody is just standing, looking south and watching this happen. What we didn't realize is in this time period, that's when the second plane had hit."
Four years after that day, Courtney realized she had a mole that was growing. A visit to her dermatologist led her to be diagnosed with invasive malignant melanoma, stage 1B-2A. Doctors removed it surgically, but it returned two years later, and then twice more after that.
Her husband saw something about the World Trade Center Health Program on the TV. "He's texting me and he's like, 'what was the address of (your job)?' And I said, 'I don't know. I was right out of college. I don't know, that was so long ago.' And he said, 'Well, what was it within a mile and a half of the World Trade Center?'" So she applied to the program.
After giving the organization her medical information, her health conditions were traceable to 9/11. Now, she sees one of its doctors annually, gets scanned every six months at the hospital, and gets seen by a dermatologist at home in between visits.
