After the wee hours of this morning, which I recorded in my last entry, we returned to my apartment and started returning calls to family and friends. We must have had 30-40 calls to return. As we returned them, more people clicked through and adding new concerned people to the equation is just too much right now so we have not decided to speak with those people. If you are one of them, I am sorry, but we have to keep momentum if we can hope to find my friend's husband and his 3 friends.

My roommate and I each took two hours on the phone, with me switching off to man e-mail.

And then I got a call from my friend. She sounded tight and controlled and she asked me all of these questions about new trauma locations and if we'd been there, which we had. And then her mother called with the same tightness and the same question and I knew they wanted me back down there, moving from ER to ER and checking the patient lists.

It was the 18th-hour of the time span we had spent walking this island and asking medical personnel if they recognized his picture, and to look at his hands, as his face could be burned and unrecognizable.

We dried our tears and hung up the phone with the promise to go out again to look.

We showered and put on our third change of clothes, stopped at a deli and ate for the first time in 27 hours and headed back downtown to the new patient headquarters.

We stepped out of our taxi into a hazy white smog that looked like a heavy fog of dust but smelled acrid. I thought something was on fire. I frantically looked around to determine if we were under attack again, and then noticed that everyone in the area was wearing surgical masks. Police waved us into a nearby building and gave us masks. They explained that the cinders and ash were being carried in the wind and we should guard our eyes too as there may be toxic chemicals and asbestos.

We headed out to the streets. We checked the hospital lists and had no luck. We sent friends to hospitals and burn units uptown, on the West Side, in NJ, Staten Island and even sent someone out to Ellis Island. Nothing.

We got out pens and paper and started our assignments. Family in Philly were given all hotline numbers, as we received them, to call. We also supplied them with fax lines to every ER with patients where they faxed a stat sheet with photo of our friend. We had a graphic designer friend come meet us and pick up a photo to go create flyers for us.

Another friend came later to continue to check our lists and talk through surgical masks while we went into a deli to eat something. By now, I could barely see, my eyes were so covered with a thick, white film. I took my contacts out and washed them in the sink; they appeared as if someone had poured milk on them.

While checking the lists and adding our friends to prayer lists, I found myself staring at the American flag flying at Bellevue. I absentmindly asked the Chaplain to please have them fly the flag at half mast. Then I walked away and asked the police to send a memo out for the City to change the position of all flags. They looked at me with concern and asked me who I was searching for and if I needed to speak with someone. "I only need to see new lists," I explained, and walked back to my makeshift war room that we set up on the sidewalk between 28th and 29th on First. I stopped and asked a stranger what the day of the week it is. Wednesday, they told me. I started making rounds to find out if anyone had new information and found at least 5 people I went to college with, all searching for other people I knew. I spoke with them briefly, not getting too involved so as not to loose my focus. I can't find everyone and right now I have one priority.

I got a call from D., at the patient HQ on the Westside, helping us. She ran into another close friend's little brother, our other friend is also missing. She was a wreck. My roommate worked with her to focus her as I added his name to our list of the missing.

The information coming out was good. There were about 1800 people alive and still unidentified. We have a chance. The numbers of found people in my friend's 120-man firm rose from 1 to 63 in a matter of hours. People were confirmed to have gotten out and they were reporting to the company, others had fled immediately with them and may be alive.

We had to keep up our efforts. A detective who helped us this morning found us sprawled on the sidewalk wearing our surgical masks with pages of papers and notes and photos and two cell phones and he walked over and asked what were still doing there. He had told us to go home at 7AM. "We can't stay home, we have to keep searching," we explained. Until there is no hope, we must keep searching. My roommate asked him what our chances were, honestly at this point, and he said, based on our tenacity he believed that we would succeed. Other detectives with him surrounded us and asked where our friend was when the planes hit. Everytime we said "Building 2, 102nd Flr." they flinch and wish us luck but we explain, someone got out from 100, 102 and 103!

In a strange fluke of luck, we found our victims' sister, whom had arrived with his dental and medical records to complete his case file that we started over 24 hours before. She was remarkably calm and poised and energized us. We finally felt like we had help, even though our friends had been helping all day.

After 25 hours straight of searching for him, we decided to start a media push in the hopes that nurses in critical care might be watching and recognize him.

Our flyers arrived and we started giving them out to medical personnel. My roommate and I got his photo on ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings and Barbara Walters. We also placed it on local ABC.

We enlisted our friends, my colleagues and every Publicist I know. I assigned them media outlets. Combined to date, we have scored NBC and FOX affiliates, ABC National and Good Morning America.

We walked around and checked lists until after 9PM. We came home and flushed our eyes and put away our surgical masks. We shut our windows and sealed our apartment from the dust that has now reached our area.

Tonight we have decided to sleep and tomorrow we will start again at the hospitals, searching.

Thank you all for your notes and e-mails, they mean so much.

Understand that we have hope and the most wonderful thing to come out of all of this is to experience the sense of community among New York's strangers.

As we rode uptown we were startled to see that the streets are already crowded again and the bars and restaurants are packed. Life is resuming and I hope that the news captures this, so that whomever is responsible can see that while our buildings can be broken, our New York-American spirits cannot.

And we will retaliate to the fullest extent, if I have to do it myself.

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