EDITOR'S PAGE
Dan O'Connor
Postcard From the ASCA Meeting in Boston
The conference coincided with the biggest terrorist attack since 9/11.
Manhunt. Lockdown. Police tape. Shelter in place. Terror
attack. Wolf Blitzer. All that was missing from last month's Ambulatory Surgery Center Association conference in Boston was a tea party and a famous keynote speaker.
Not that the meeting needed a marquee name.
It had the riveting Boston Marathon bombing.
The ASCA meeting coincided with the surreal aftermath of the biggest
terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. The meeting, perilously close to being canceled, went on pretty much as planned at the Hynes Convention Center, 3 blocks west of the explosion site, under odd and
trying circumstances.
"It was emotionally draining," says Elayne Clark, RN, CASC, administrator of the 4th Street Laser & Surgery Center of Santa Rosa, Calif. "Boston looked like a ghost town. It just got so intense and so emotionally involved."
While the city around them froze in place and held its breath and watched as the good guys went door-to-door hunting for the bad guy,
surgery center managers dutifully attended their educational sessions
and earned their CEUs and visited the exhibitors' booths. ASCA did its best to run the conference as if the Tsarnaev brothers and pressurecooker bombs never existed — remarkably, there were only minor disruptions and a few cancellations — but you couldn't escape the eerie
reminders of the bombing. Every-where you turned, they were there.
Like the TV news crews, heavily armed police and, perhaps most noticeably, the floor-to-ceiling glass windows on the top floor of the convention center that overlook Boylston Street, the major east-west thoroughfare where the bombs exploded near the finish line. Between sessions, dozens of attendees pressed against the windows to peer
