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 pressure-cooker 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 down onto the blocked-off street and shuttered storefronts, snapping pictures with their smartphones of the chilling and undisturbed crime scene below.

"Looking out those windows down onto the street put me under," says Ms. Clark. "There was so much that fed into the emotional overload."

ASCA's had some pretty big names collect pretty big checks to speak at its recent meetings: Reba McEntire (country music artist and actress), Magic Johnson (former NBA great), Ben Stein (political and economic commentator) and John Stossel (consumer reporter who repeatedly referred to ASCs as ACSs during his talk), to name a few. None could hold a candle to the Boston bombing.

"Every free minute I had, I was glued to the TV," says Ms. Clark, who had planned to spend a couple extra days sightseeing in Boston, but cut her trip short and flew home early. "At one point, I walked past an unattended backpack. That's what pushed me over the edge."

In some small way, the 2,000 or so surgical facility leaders who attended the ASCA conference helped return Boston to some sense of normalcy. For that alone, they should feel proud and privileged that they dropped in on the Boston bombing.