Topic: Marcy Borders, 9/11's 'dust lady', dies of stomach cancer (Read 266 times)

Bank worker who survived World Trade Center terror attack dies at 42 after year-long battle with cancer

It was one of the most haunting images that emerged after 9/11: a woman covered in ash and powdered concrete fleeing the World Trade Center after the first plane struck the tower and brought horror to the heart of New York.

Marcy Borders was a 28-year-old Bank of America worker when the photograph of her staring into the lens with her eyes asquint and her mouth agape was taken. Borders, who came to be known around the world as “dust lady”, died on Monday at the age of 42 after a year-long battle with stomach cancer that she blamed on dust inhaled during the attack.

“I can’t believe my sister is gone,” Michael Borders wrote of his sibling on Facebook. Borders’ cousin John Borde added that she was a “hero” and she “unfortunately succumbed to the diseases that have ridden her body since 9/11”.

“In addition to losing so many friends, coworkers, and colleagues on and after that tragic day ... the pain from yesteryear has found a way to resurface,” he said.

Borders was photographed by Stan Honda, of the AFP agency after she was pulled in to a building lobby after watching the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. She had no idea that the picture had been taken until her mother called to say she had seen the picture. The image, which appeared in Time Magazine’s list of 25 most powerful images, remained an emblem of the problems that continued to trouble her after the attacks.

She told the Jersey Journal before her death: “I’m saying to myself ‘Did this thing ignite cancer cells in me?’ I definitely believe it because I haven’t had any illnesses. I don’t have high blood pressure … high cholesterol, diabetes.

“How do you go from being healthy to waking up the next day with cancer?”

Borders, of Bayonne, New Jersey, was just a month into her new job on the 81st floor of the north tower when American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the building. Instead of remaining at her desk, as her supervisor had ordered, she ran from the building and into the chaotic street, which was heaving with enormous clouds of dust and the hordes of walking wounded.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/26/911s-dust-lady-marcy-borders-dies-of-stomach-cancer