Thread by @InsideEdition

THREAD: 19 years after #September11, a civilian survivor recounts her years-long battle with PTSD. – @Mayanyani
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1/11 Kayla Bergeron (@nycajun1) was sitting at her desk on the 68th floor in the North Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 when she felt the building lurch forward.
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2/11 Immediately, Bergeron, who was the director of public affairs for Port Authority at the time, knew something was wrong and in fact, she thought a small plane had hit their building.
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3/11 She was busy trying to organize where her teammates would work for the day when a security guard came and told them they had to evacuate using the stairs.
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4/11 On their way down the stairs, a colleague showed her a news article with the reality of what was happening: there had been an attack on the World Trade Center, and it was believed to be a work of terrorism.
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5/11 "I said, ‘Let's get this line moving!’ We didn't want to set off panic among people. Can you imagine somebody saying that? It would be a stampede…”
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6/11 “…Finally, we knew the South Tower was down because the sheer force of the other tower shook our tower. The building twisted, the lights went off and there was a rush of water.” – @nycajun1
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7/11 By the time they made it to the sixth floor of the dark North Tower, the exit was blocked. It was then that Bergeron thought she “was going to die,” because they didn’t see a way out.
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8/11 Eventually, a Port Authority police officer showed up, however, and ushered them back up the stairs to different exit and they made it outside to the street.
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9/11 “All of a sudden a cop says, ‘Run.' I'm like ‘Run?’ Then I turned around and here comes the building imploding. It was a tremendous plume of black.” – @nycajun1
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10/11 Bergeron would later find that 74 of her colleagues, including 33 Port Authority police, had been killed in the building.
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11/11 From that moment on, Bergeron lived with the trauma she suffered that day— but it wasn’t until years later did the reality of that trauma catch up to her.
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For @Mayanyani’s full story Half of Civilian 9/11 Survivor's Years-long Battle With PTSD Was Realizing She Had It:
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