By RITA FERRANDINO
Staff Writer

Dr. Jonathan Svahn, a 1987 graduate of Cooperstown Central School, first witnessed the end of New York as we know it through the windows of Bellevue's intensive care unit, which afforded a "perfect view" of the World Trade Center. Braced for a barrage of victims, doctors across the city waited with emergency plans in place on Tuesday morning. The absence of patients led them to a chilling realization: people had either made it mostly unhurt, or they had not.

Dr. Jennifer Svahn, Jonathan's sister, graduated from CCS in 1983. Now a vascular surgeon at Beth Israel, she was at her Brooklyn Heights home reading a book to her son Jack early Tuesday morning. Her husband, Dr. Jeff Nicastro, head of trauma and surgical emergency at Staten Island University Hospital, was already gone for the day when the family's nanny arrived with a frantic announcement.

"The tremendous, gorgeous, priceless view of the Manhattan skyline was filled with smoke," Svahn said, not knowing that her life would never be the same or that hours later, she would be one of the few people in the world to stand in the place where the city's tallest towers once stood, looking for victims and finding none, then photographing the ashy carnage at ground zero. But that moment was still in the dim future.

Thinking that a plane had accidentally torn into the tower, Svahn began filming. The camera was still rolling when the second craft cut like a comet into the other tower. Svahn, who lives at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, immediately attempted to make it to Beth Israel.

"I couldn't get over the bridge," she said. "Phones and beepers didn't work. Nobody thought yet to be using e-mail, which turns out to be the only consistent form of communication."

In scrubs, with her identification, Svahn was escorted by police up the FDR Drive. Fearing that a major thoroughfare leading into Manhattan would be a prime target, Svahn said the ride was bizarre and terrifying. At long last she reached her destination, recalling emergency plans set into place for occasions that had proven to be non-events, like the millennium festivities that went off without a hitch.

"We found ourselves implementing trauma disaster plans we never thought we were going to use," Svahn said. "Fear was controlled. Everyone functioned and cooperated. Everyone was waiting, waiting, waiting. And then nobody was coming. It just wasn't a good sign."

While Svahn was treating victims of minor smoke inhalation and slight lacerations, her brother, Dr. Jonathan Svahn, chief resident of general surgery at NYU Medical Center, was caring for his first three patients of the day at Bellevue.

"A woman had been trampled," he said. "There was a fireman who had already died, and another person with a head injury. Then it got quiet. We all expected a lot of people who'd been showered with shrapnel when the second plane hit. There were a lot of rumors. It was very frightening. Was this it? Was it just beginning? Was it biological warfare? Nobody knew exactly what we were dealing with."

Tuesday night, Jennifer Svahn walked six and a half miles home, this time crossing the Manhattan Bridge. She feared being underwater in a tunnel, but the walk home, alone in the dark, proved no less terrifying. The long walk was punctuated by thoughts of the day's cataclysmic events and images of people "crying, vomiting, running, screaming and closing windows."

"It was desolate, surreal, empty vacancy," she said. "Was it germ warfare? What are we breathing? Are we all going to be dying in the next few hours? There was such fear, on the one hand, but on the other hand, because of the cushion of distance, removal from it."

She finally drifted to sleep that night watching CNN. The next morning, a nurse gave her a lift back to work.

"There had been no barrage of trauma victims arriving in the night," she said. "There was nothing coming."

In frustration, wanting to do something, Svahn walked to Third Avenue and flagged down police who drove her to "the wreck." Once there, her scrubs and identification afforded her a privileged position. She passed FBI agents on her way to the epicenter of the destruction.

"It was a bizarre kind of freedom in that zone because it was restricted," she said. She described the dangerous heat and stench of the site, the instability of the surrounding buildings, the asbestos, so cautiously removed from so many structures, clogging the air. "There were all kinds of rumors about body parts and that kind of thing, but that's not how it was. There were sneakers here and there and children's toys. People wrote things in the dust with their fingers, like God Bless America. But mostly it was like walking through a gigantic crematorium."

After a brief hesitation, Svahn decided to take pictures for her personal records. She took down addresses from rescuers on the scene for the purpose of mailing them copies later. Some of the pictures appeared in The New York Times on Wednesday, after Svahn realized that members of the press had no access at all to the restricted zone. Her brother later made a trip to the site with an organized group of physicians hoping to offer assistance to victims found in the rubble.

"We were afraid of falling buildings," said Svahn. "And gas lines could have been severed, anything could have happened. We went there hoping to help, but there was nobody to help. Then pandemonium kicked in because somebody who feared a falling building started to run and the herd mentality took over. Get the hell away from whatever's happening. In a situation like this, it's every man for himself."

The stampede he witnessed at the scene granted Svahn appreciation of other historical points, he said. He likened the situation to soldiers during World War II gathering together in silence for information. The individualistic impulses experienced by doctors at the World Trade Center's skeletal remains were balanced, fortunately, by that same sense of unity.

"In a relatively quick time, we were all standing together, ready to do something," Svahn said. "On New Year's Eve we had a plan, but nothing happened. As doctors, we make sacrifices, sleeping in the hospital, doing what we have to do. But that doesn't compare to what the rescuers have been out there doing. The human emotions experienced by the different groups involved in this change based on distance. The medical community sees trauma victims regularly. People with their arms and legs ripped off, and we're buffered by that. I haven't seen much of it in this instance. I'm less traumatized as a doctor than I am as a New Yorker."

"As a surgeon, the body parts have much less of an impact," said Jennifer Svahn, echoing her brother's sentiment. "But the grandiosity of the absolute destruction of Manhattan, which used to be unthinkable—we thought we were safe. The skyline is unrecognizable. And you just get lost in the carnage. It's hard to know where you are. Everything isolated, deserted, it's a white ghost town. Food carts were abandoned, stores were just sitting there deserted with their doors open, cars were incinerated and flipped over, windows were busted out. On the positive side, New York's tremendous division along racial, economic, religious and gender lines are just gone. Everyone talks to everyone. Everyone is looking for something, for someone. People are being kind. The cops are being really decent. Everybody is involved, they all want to help. This couldn't possibly be me walking in this film set, I think, but it is. This is the first time in a long time I've felt any collective public respect. It's a notable feeling that we, as doctors, discuss among ourselves."

The Svahns come from a long line of physicians. Their mother, Karin, was a nurse. Their father, Dr. David Svahn, conducted an assembly this week at Bassett Hospital aimed at deciphering nineteenth century medical jargon to diagnose the final illness of America's first great literary figure, James Fenimore Cooper, on the 150th anniversary of his death.

"It's just chance that my kids are surgeons," said Svahn, who was teaching nurse practitioner students how to diagnose skin lesions when the news came through. "And just chance that they work down there. And right now, there's dreadfully little to do. When Jonathan was five or six, in the early seventies, when the World Trade Center had just been built, he asked to go to the "World Training Center." That's what he thought it was called. And we ended up taking little Jonathan there. And now he's over there looking at this huge pile of refuse at what was once his World Training Center. And here he is, grown up, in a position to help. And when he was a boy and the building was new we couldn't have imagined this. A woman on television likened it to seeing a friend who just got his two front teeth knocked out. You just can't take your eyes off it."

Jonathan and Jennifer plan to stay put in New York City.

"I'm a firm believer that if people start moving out of the city, not going out to dinner, being afraid, that's a way of letting them win. Personally, I'm determined not to let that happen," said Jonathan. "It's going to help New York as soon as we get back to being ourselves. Being a New Yorker in New York right now—there's just something about not having those towers here that people outside New York just can't understand. A large part of the city has vanished. It's gone."

"Everyone is distracted," said Jennifer Svahn, "but life must go on. It's a personal fear, literally, not just an existential fear. I believe that in the next week they will be saving some of the victims still stuck in the rubble. Those who haven't starved to death or dehydrated, or died of injuries that are going untreated. It's a war zone, and my brother, my husband and I have agreed that unless we're needed medically, we're just not going back there."

This story, "Doctors Prepare for the Worst, and Wait," will appear simultaneously in a New York City newspaper, The Village Voice, and can be accessed at www.villagevoice.com.