I spent years at Ground Zero after 9/11... two decades later I was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer

Kristin-Marie Pernicano was on the 49th floor of her office at Goldman Sachs directly across from the World Trade Center when the first plane hit on September 11, 2001.

'It was a perfect blue-sky day. I remember what I was wearing. I remember the smell. We rushed to the windows and could see the papers falling from the offices; at first it looked like a ticker tape parade,' the 45-year-old New Yorker says.

'When the first tower fell, I saw things you never want to see. I remember hearing silence, like static electricity, like all the sound got sucked into a vacuum. It was the most eerie thing.'

When the second plane hit, she felt the floor shake beneath her and the fire alarms went off.

A voice over the loudspeaker told everyone to evacuate immediately and Pernicano, who was an International Equities Sales and Trading officer at Goldman Sachs, along with her colleagues, filed silently down 49 flights of stairs, high-heels in hand, emerging into the chaos of lower Manhattan.

She began the long walk home uptown, as the skyline behind her changed by the minute.

'From downtown to 14th Street is about three miles. Because of what we looked like, no shoes, covered in soot, people were staring as we walked north. I remember stopping at a sporting goods store on 14th Street to buy sneakers so we could keep going,' she says.

The next day was her birthday, and she spent it at Ground Zero, trying to reach friends who were missing.

In the weeks that followed, Pernicano returned to work at Goldman Sachs, walking each day through streets patrolled by the National Guard, the air thick with the aftermath of the attacks.

Pernicano didn't know that those months spent in the dust and smoke would shape her life more than 20 years later.

In the years that followed the attacks, Pernicano worked her way up through international trading compliance, building a career on Wall Street that took her to senior roles at some of the largest banks, including Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs.

In 2009, she founded her own consultancy firm, KMP Consulting.

But in November 2022, her life was forever changed after she found a lump near her chest muscle.

Pernicano was healthy; a non-smoker, with no family history of cancer, and she assumed it was just an injury from working out.

But when the lump didn't go away, she decided to get it checked by a doctor and tests revealed a 10cm tumor in her breast and a swollen lymph node.

She was diagnosed with aggressive triple-positive breast cancer.

Triple-positive breast cancer is a form of breast cancer that tests positive for three biological markers: estrogen receptors, progesterone receptors and the human epidermal growth factor 2 (HER2) protein.

This leads to an aggressive, fast-growing cancer.

According to MD Anderson Cancer Center, it accounts for about 10 percent of all breast cancer diagnoses. In 2025, the American Cancer Society estimates there will be 316,950 new breast cancer cases and 42,170 deaths.

However, HER2-type breast cancers are considered some of the most treatable, as they are very responsive to treatments.

The NIH's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results Program (SEER) estimates survival rates for HER2-positive breast cancers to be anywhere from 47 percent to 99 percent based on how far from the original tumor the disease has spread.

Pernicano's disease has since been officially certified by the World Trade Center Health Program, an organization that links cancers and illnesses to toxins released after the 9/11 terror attacks. Approximately 140,000 people are listed in the program.

She says: 'I was at work every single day. I walked through the soot and ash and all of this heaviness.

'The stuff in the air, things that were burning and stuff coming up from the ground. It was around for a very long time and that is what made me ill.'

Researchers and previous studies have found that the dust, soot and other toxic pollutants released into the air from the attacks and inhaled on 9/11 and the months following were absorbed by the body, causing massive inflammation and cell damage.

This has led to diseases such as cancer and chronic lung conditions.

As she was diagnosed, Pernicano said: 'The radiologist held my hand and said: "I need you to know you're going to be okay." And I just burst out crying.

'I remember walking out, headed for a client meeting, and I was in a state of shock. It was freezing cold outside, like winter had descended. I don't even remember how I got myself to the subway. I was just numb.'

She continued: 'It was like my whole life got thrown into a blender. I was teaching at NYU, running my consulting business, training hard. Overnight I was a full-time patient. But I was determined not to stop working.'

Pernicano's treatment began in January 2023 and her medical team threw everything at the cancer: five months of intensive chemotherapy, 25 rounds of radiation, major surgery and a year of immunotherapy.

It's been a long and grueling journey, but Pernicano has refused to let the disease take her strength.

A former national martial art Muay Thai champion and marathon runner, she trained before every chemotherapy session.

'Every Thursday, before treatment, my trainer pushed me hard. I knew I had days ahead where I'd be exhausted. So I fought to keep as much strength as I could. It wasn't about inspiring anyone else. It was about holding on to myself,' she says.

Some days she dragged herself from the hospital to teach classes at NYU, determined not to let her students down.

Other days she walked miles through Brooklyn just to keep moving, even when fatigue and nausea hit hard.

Her medical team told her that her fitness allowed them to treat her cancer more aggressively and helped her body recover faster than expected.

'The response was far beyond what anyone predicted,' Pernicano said.

But the treatment came at a cost; she had a bilateral mastectomy (the removal all tissue from both breasts), followed by a reconstructive surgery.

She continues endocrine treatment, a type of drug therapy that blocks the effect of the hormones estrogen and progesterone on breast cancer cells, which has plunged her into medical menopause.

'My body has aged 20 years in two [years]. I am experiencing many of the same age-related health issues as my mother.'

Bone density loss, joint pain and relentless fatigue are now part of her daily life.

Even so, she refuses to let illness define her. As soon as she could, she rebuilt her strength gradually, returning to training, teaching and her consulting work.

She said: 'Cancer didn't build my character. It revealed it. I had to decide: do I let this break me, or do I live the life I want, even on the hard days?'

Part of that life has been launching the Business Decoded Series, online courses built from her years advising companies on strategy and growth. The idea came to her mid-treatment.

'I realized I had spent years helping other businesses build systems so they didn't burn out,' she says.

'But I hadn't done the same for myself. I was working all the way through my treatment.

'With one of the chemos, there is a risk that your nail beds [in your hands and feet] pop out because of how the blood flows.

'So I was sitting there with my hands and feet in ice for two hours while having the treatment and I was on a conference call with a client.

'It hit me that if I survived, I had to create something that didn't depend on me being in 10 places at once.'

The courses now give entrepreneurs access to the same tools she once delivered in person, helping them build companies without sacrificing their health or work/life balance.

Now in remission, she reflects on the arc from 9/11 to cancer to recovery.

'It's only in the past year that I've processed the severity of it all. The fear, the surgeries, the treatments. But also the beauty, the people who carried me, the chance to keep living, to keep teaching, to keep building,' she says.

'I feel almost grateful to be part of that cohort. It means research, support and advocacy for the long term.'

She knows the road ahead will not be simple. There will be more scans, side effects and treatments to manage. But she insists life is bigger than illness.

She added: 'Every day I wake up, I'm grateful. I can't control everything, but I can control how I show up, for my students, my clients, my friends, myself. Cancer took a lot, but it didn't take that.'