what hurricanes can bring

We on the Southeast Coast are waiting to see which way Hurricane Matthew blows and hoping it is not toward us or any other highly inhabited area. Best case scenario is it will head to the open waters and dissipate. We will see.

I remember Hurricane Hugo in 1989 though some of the timeline is sketchy.
We were living in Columbia, a hundred miles inland, but Hugo cut a wide destructive swath. I remember lying in bed around midnight, listening to the pounding rains and strong winds, and sensing the strange atmospheric colors and sounds. At one point, I felt the eerie calm eye pass over. The next morning we found the neighborhood to be littered with debris, and trees and mailboxes down.

But what I remember the most is the new batch of patients who arrived at my hospital in the wee small hours. Possibly it was the next night. My diary would know, but I am not going fishing for it.

During the evening shift as I was working, my small privately owned psychiatric hospital got a call from its sister hospital in Charleston asking if we could take some of their patients who needed to be evacuated. The more stable patients could have gone to their homes or families, so the ones we were getting were not in good enough shape to be turned out in the community. A hospital rarely has extra beds, so we had to prepare exhaustively, using every available space and resource for them.

I stayed on. About three a.m. the bus arrived, and out walked a group of people, the likes of whom I had never seen before. I struggled to be professional and keep my true reactions - that I now attribute  to naiveté - to myself. But at the time, I thought they were the weirdest individuals I had ever seen. I had never heard names such as theirs, nor had I heard such stories! I had been a nurse only four years and had become pretty comfortable with the types of patients I had in my geographical area, and these new ones were as foreign as they come!

But over the next few weeks as I took care of them physically and emotionally, I began to love them just as I did my other patients. They got better - more functional - and one by one they were discharged. It was an experience for me, a growing, learning one.

I hope those will remain my two best hurricane tales.