She seemed to shrink, her body curling down on itself, and then she screamed. Her daughter began to sob; her son tearfully swung at members of the staff, his arms arcing blindly. After a moment of this, he began to pound and kick the wall and then, following the example of his sister, he tried to comfort his mother. Mrs. Orlando was crying, "No, no, I won't let you say that." She allowed herself to be led into another room. There was a short silence, and then she cried loudly. Her sobs were heard in the lobby for the next hour.

An MIT undergraduate, working in the emergency ward on a computer study project, watched it all. "I don't know how anybody can stand to work here," he said.

Dr. Martin Nathan, a surgical resident who had also seen it, said to him, "There are good ways to find out, and there are bad ways to find out. That was a bad way."

"Are there any good ways?" the student asked.

"Yes," the resident said. "There are."

A few minutes later, a nurse went into the private room with sedation for Mrs. Orlando and her family. Soon thereafter, the emergency ward received confirmation that the remaining casualties had been treated at other hospitals. The five in the emergency ward were being cared for; three would go to surgery in the next hour. The extra personnel began to leave, in twos and threes, and things slowly returned to normal. One hour and ten minutes had passed since the first patient arrived.

At 6 p.m., a forty-six-year-old insurance salesman arrived after vomiting up blood; twenty minutes after that, a man came in with his sixty-one-year-old mother, who had suddenly lost her ability to speak and seemed to have trouble keeping her balance; then came a nineteen-year-old graduate student who had broken a glass while washing dishes and cut her ankle.