Storms ahead

The last few days there have been storms in Atlanta. I have to admit, I slept through the ones on Friday night, but I hear they were pretty intense. Weather people were debating on whether there was a tornado or just intense winds that ravaged downtown. I think the National Weather Service weighed in that it really was a tornado. That was all the news on Saturday. Amazingly no fatalities...but a bunch of idiots were walking around downtown in all that glass and debris to check it out for themselves. Um, the TV crews are down there. You don't need to be adding to the chaos just so you can check it out for yourself. The storms Saturday touched a little closer. We have a friend who has had weird seizures for about a year. The doctors can't figure out what's going on, but they've gotten so intense and caused his body so much trauma that he was put in ICU at our local hospital on Thursday. A church member had her baby on Friday, so now that Kenny got back from Meg's field trip, we needed to go and do our hospital visits. So we leave the kids home with Ken and Sandra and drive off in what was just sprinkles. As we're heading down the road, the rain intensifies. At that point we realize that we'd both heard that he might be leaving ICU and with the rain, we didn't want to have to be roaming the hospital. So Kenny calls one of his friends, who is also a family member of the hospitalized guy. As he's talking to him the rain is really drumming down. He asks this guy where he's driving at because the background noise is the different than the noise the rains making and we are maybe a 1/2 mile from his house. The guys says he's at home but there's hail the size of golfballs coming down! Okay, so that's weird. We make it to the hospital, Kenny pulls up and drops me off at the overhang and goes to park the car. THAT's when the hail hits! Kenny dodges the hail coming down and we head up to ICU. Inside the ICU waiting area are the wife and mom of the hospitalized guy. There is a tornado WARNING that has just been posted. All ICU patients were taken out of their rooms and placed in interior halls of the ICU and all family members were booted to the waiting room! We get told this and then suddenly the door to the waiting room from ICU get thrown open and a nurse bustles in with sheets and blankets and instructions that if she yells, that we are all to go into a nearby ladies room and hunker down! Apparently the tornado is coming right for us!

Such excitement. It ended up going around the hospital and causing a whole bunch of damage in Covington. But all in all, I guess the safest place to be in an emergency is outside the ICU! I was actually glad we ended up there because the wife was fit to be tied. She ended up crying when she saw me (I thought they'd heard really bad news and were in the waiting room because her husband was having tests or something) and I braced for the news. Turned out she was just so stressed about her husband, that the tornado was the final blow. Kenny and I were someone new and she was so grateful she just let go. Awww. That was a good moment. We also were able to reassure her that her kids were in a basement with their cousins and several adults (the friend Kenny had called earlier) so that was icing.