Day #2 of My Katrina Story

I woke up the next morning not really having slept. I mainly worked the 7p-7a shift so I was not accustomed to resting at night. It was Sunday and my only hope at this point was a mandatory evacuation which I could have sworn on the news said was in effect. Now, at this point, it is very important that you understand the structure of the hospital. It was two stories with all the patient units on the second floor. Just two weeks prior to the storm, the hospital opened up a new 7 million dollar wing complete with a state of the art ICU unit on the bottom floor and a beautiful, wide cement balcony. Mabe a covered terrace is more like it. Anyway, the second floor of the new addition was just a little higher up than the old part of the building.
I didn't do much that morning. I watched more news, I listened to the plans to move patients and tried to play some games on my laptop. I wish I would have had the sense to be sure I had a full charge on my cell phone while I was sitting there. My dad called me in a panic about noon begging me to leave before the contraflow ended. I tried not to let him hear me start to cry. I told him my car was broken down and I had no choice but to stay at that point. He told me to be careful. I knew he was wishing there was a way he could come get me. This was when I started feeling stupid for leaving my family and putting myself in danger. My children had already lost their father not even two years earlier. How could I put myself in this position? I started to feel fear on a new level that I had never experienced. I had no idea then how more familiar with the spectrum of fear I would become.
About 2pm one of the young nurses approached me with a favor to ask. This little girl and I had some differences between us recently. She jumped down my throat one morning when she came in to pick up my patients from me, something about some pain medicine I didn't give that was due just moments before she took over. I proceeded to jump down her throat in return and by the time I came back to work that night she was all apologies. Now, she needed a favor. She was scheduled to work the 3p-11p shift but if she left right then she could make in time to evacuate with her family. Would I take her shift? I did. What the hell, mabe I was saving the girl's life. I guess as helpless as I felt it made me feel like I was doing some good. So, I clocked in. I had a few patients that were being transferred to our sister hospital in New Orleans East along with a couple of our nurses to go with them. This was the idiots in power calling themselves "evacuating". I got all the pertinent paperwork and charts together to send with them and helped get them loaded on the bus. By the end of the night, we pretty much had the patients (lots of them with family members) that would be riding it out. The storm would be coming in the early hours of the morning. We started transporting all of the patients to the new wing along with all of the food and laundry that we could find on the bottom floor. My boyfriend and I moved to a different room closer to the new wing and got settled.
I had to work straight into my night shift that I was scheduled to work. Everyone was nervous but this was hardly anyone's first rodeo with a hurricane. Surely, it would pass through tomorrow and at the most we would have to wait a day for transport of some kind to come get us. We were pretty secure where we were at, everything would be okay.