It was a beautiful evening, warm but not too warm. Helena Ayeh, a freelance architect, had stepped out from her apartment on 23rd Street, to buy some wine to go with the dinner she was about to cook.  “I was going to make a lovely meal, some fish and asparagus,” she said. “I was really looking forward to it.”  Ayeh strolled to a wine store in the West Village, then headed home with a bottle of Burgundy, a bottle of Bordeaux “and a plonk”. There were 10 to 15 paces left, she thought, before she reached the entrance to her building, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Chelsea.  “I heard the biggest bang ever,” she said, “and the next thing I knew I was airborne.”  Ayeh was knocked forward then down to the sidewalk. She scrambled up, confused.  “I felt for my keys in my bag; my knees were wobbly. When I pulled my keys out, I couldn’t see them properly – everything was blurry. I must have realized there had been some sort of blast, because I wondered if my glasses had been blown off. But they were intact.”  On Friday, sitting in her sunlit sixth-floor studio, Ayeh put her hand to her glasses. She recalled her realisation that there was glass underfoot and one of her sandals was broken. She had put one hand up to her right eye.  “It was all wet. I saw blood and that’s when I freaked out. I ran into the road shouting, ‘Help, help’. Some man came up and put his arm around me. I learned later that it was plainclothes police officer.”  Six days after a bomb exploded directly opposite her apartment building, Ayeh’s right eye is still vividly bloodshot, with dark bruising below. She is one of 31 people who were injured when the Chelsea bomb exploded, at around 8.30pm on Saturday 18 September. Shortly after that, another pressure cooker bomb was retrieved, unexploded, from 27th Street. New York City went on full alert. A terrorist was likely at large.  On Monday morning, prime suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, was arrested in Linden, New Jersey. An Afghan-born US citizen, he has been charged in connection with both New York bombs and several explosives that were found in New Jersey. Two of those devices exploded – no one was hurt.  As Ayeh spoke on Friday, Rahami was still in hospital, having been shot and seriously wounded during his arrest. He had yet to appear before a judge. His father, Mohammad Rahami, said he had warned the FBI his son was a potential terrorist, but they did not interview Ahmad.  It is believed Ahmad Khan Rahami may have become radicalized on visits to Pakistan, where he spent time studying in an area where the Taliban has a heavy presence, the Guardian revealed on Friday.  The 23rd Street bomb was filled with ball bearings, but it did not kill anyone. Nonetheless, while the sense among New Yorkers is that their city has had a lucky escape, Ayeh and others spent time in in four hospitals, spread across Manhattan.  A handful of those injured declined medical attention. Others were bleeding profusely from lacerations, pierced by shrapnel, nursing concussions and broken teeth or, in the case of a woman who had been driving on 23rd Street with her boyfriend, wondering whether her unborn baby would be OK.  Ayeh said on Friday that when people were killed, many forget the injured. Even in this case, where, perhaps miraculously, no one died, nobody from the city authorities had been in contact with Ayeh since the bombing.  “I’ve heard nothing, zilch,” she said, though she commended authorities for finding the suspect and capturing him alive.  She was shocked, she said, that although New York mayor Bill de Blasio had been on the scene on 23rd Street in the days after the bombing, he had not, so far as she was aware, contacted those who were injured. She certainly had not heard from anyone from city or state government. FBI agents had been “very sweet”, she said, and had checked up on her. Someone even left a bunch of Get Well balloons outside her apartment.  After the blast, Ayeh said, she was quickly bundled into an ambulance. “First thing I asked the medic inside was, ‘Is my eye still there?’ and she said it was.”  The bleeding wouldn’t stop. Ayeh’s white T-shirt and shorts were soaked. The paramedic told her to close both her eyes and stay still.  The paramedic said, ‘Do you believe in God?’ and I said ‘yes’, and she said ‘pray’. I thought, ‘That’s not good.’  “She said, ‘Do you believe in God?’ and I said ‘yes’, and she said ‘pray’. I thought, ‘That’s not good.’ I started mumbling a prayer, I asked her to pray for me too and she said, ‘I’ve been praying all along’. That was worrying. I could feel the blood dripping on to my arm.”  At the hospital, a nurse called one of Ayeh’s friends. Ayeh recalled a “precious moment” of relief when her friend Sylvia arrived.  She was still dazed and in pain. She waited on a stretcher for several hours. She was given a Cat scan and a specialist examined her. She had also hurt her knee, her right arm and her wrists and hands, though not seriously.  There were no splinters of glass, metal or other shrapnel in her eye. The main cut was in the eyelid. Hospital staff stitched her up and gave her some fresh clothes. Then she was released.  She had been holding on to her purse with a death grip, she said, but although she had her ID and keys, law enforcement officers would not allow her back on to her block. She showed them the bloodied clothes in her bag and bandaged head. No dice.  “So I just wandered the streets,” she said. She had a coffee, then when her gym opened at 8am she sat in there for while. Around 11am she begged a police officer to escort her to her apartment. She succeeded, and has since been interviewed by the FBI.  As a freelance architect, Ayeh specializes in residential buildings. She had been taken on for a project that would last until the end of the year, and on Monday, despite pain and a burning sensation in her swollen eye, she went to the office. After 10 minutes, she knew her blurry vision meant she could not read documents or a computer screen. She was let go from the project.  “I understand,” she said. “Architects have deadlines and I was commissioned because they needed someone immediately, so they could not delay while I healed … but it’s rough. I’m not sure of my next step.”  Ayeh was born in Ghana and qualified as an architect there after attending private school in the capital, Accra. Her late mother was a diplomat, her late father a lawyer. She lived in France and traveled extensively before settling in New York 25 years ago, then gaining US citizenship.  She has been told her vision will recover completely. Like a true New Yorker, she is waiting impatiently.  “I’m not one to sit around,” she said. Calls from friends have helped and she has been walking west to the Hudson, to watch the sunsets.  “It’s very calm at the river,” she said.
When a pressure-cooker bomb exploded on West 23rd, Helena Ayeh suffered a frightening injury. She has since lost a job, watched the river and wondered what comes next