Unstable

Sunday was a good day. Sunday was an awful day. It was a day of going to our house for 2 hours to see that nothing had been damaged. It was a day of the hospital’s most frightening challenge of the entire storm.

Did we really need a thunderstorm with heavy rains on Sunday morning? Rains were so heavy that there was localized flooding of roads all over Houston, mainly because the rain still had no place to go but up. It felt like getting kicked while you were already down. I got four hours sleep on the cot in my office and woke up to my phone ringing – the Incident Command Center calling with some urgent task or another. The OU cap I threw on in a hurry on my way to the Board Room drew howling complaints from our Rehab Director (UT Class of “Who Cares When”) all morning.

By 12:00 noon, the situation was secure enough in the hospital that we re-opened the ER and set up a check – out system where a limited number of Directors could leave the hospital for a couple of hours to check on their homes, get fresh clothes and (if lucky) take a hot shower in a familiar place. I left the hospital at 3:30 pm for the first time since early Friday morning. It was a peculiar feeling driving home with hardly any cars on the road, no traffic lights, no businesses open, trees and power lines down on every street. Some trees were stripped bare of all their leaves. Only a few signs remained intact in front of businesses. I was struck by how little movement there was. There was no wind, barely any cars, no people out walking or riding bikes. Even the leaves – which were quite literally everywhere – were wet and heavy on the streets, and didn’t move even for the occasional car that passed over.

I got to the house and several of our neighbors were out cleaning up, trimming tree branches, removing plywood from their windows, or just sitting in lawn chairs because it was too hot to be inside without electricity. Kids were busy playing and running about, either oblivious or indifferent to their environment and how changed it looked to me. There was no damage to our house, only plants that looked like they had been blown around by 110 mph winds. I was happy to use my own bathroom (sorry, but it’s true) and the shower was hot and so relaxing I believe I fell asleep for a minute.

I threw some clean clothes in my gym bag and headed back to the hospital. The ride back was as unreal as the ride home had been, and I pulled into the hospital parking lot feeling exhausted and dreading the pace of activities that awaited inside. As I walked up to the main entrance, it became apparent that the lobby was pitch black. We had been on generator power since Friday night, and had a diesel tanker top off all our tanks Saturday evening. Still, I knew the generator had failed for some reason. I got inside the hospital and more or less felt my way to the HR department just down the hall from the entrance and unlocked my door to retrieve my flashlight. I then ran to the Command Center to check in and ask where to go to help. The CEO told me to go to the Heart Hospital. Critically ill patients had been relocated there, and the CNO had radioed for extra help bagging (using a handheld balloon pump) patients whose ventilators had lost power when the main hospital generator went down. I went to the Heart Hospital across the street – still functioning on its generator – and saw no one. I went back toward the main hospital on the walkway over Medical Center Boulevard, looking for a way to help.

I’ve worked in hospitals since my senior year of college at Phillips, back in 1986. That psychiatric hospital had a contract with the county to accept their most mentally ill arrestees. That exposed me to extraordinary circumstances of human suffering due to psychosis and schizophrenia. I’ve seen things and heard stories in my 20+ years of working in hospitals that were shocking, outrageous, terrifying and miraculous. None of it prepared me to witness the evacuation of our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

On the main hospital side of the crosswalk, I saw people stationed on each corner of each hallway with flashlights or green glow sticks. As I moved through this eerie black and green maze, I heard shouting. “Clear the stairwell!” “Stand aside!” Everyone parted to make room at the entrance to the stairwell. I aimed my flashlight on the floor with everyone else, and out from the stairwell door emerged three bodies, moving quietly in unison. The doctor was holding a 2 or 3 pound baby in his hands, flat on her back, right in front of his stomach. He was not looking at anything but the baby, but he walked straight ahead deliberately. On one side, a nurse was giving this impossibly small baby chest compressions with one finger. The nurse on the other side held a balloon pump, giving it barely perceptible squeezes to keep air moving in and out of her lungs. As quickly as they appeared out of the stairs, they disappeared around a corner, their path lit by nurses and techs and cops and security guards, all lining the halls, shining their lights, helping the only way they could but feeling helpless nonetheless.

We all stood motionless for a few seconds, and then everyone was off in a dozen different directions. More babies came down the stairs, but I didn’t see any more that needed the same level of attention the first baby needed. By the time I worked my way upstream to the NICU, it was nearly empty. “Brad – check the unit and make sure there’s no one left.” Rushing, flashlight darting from here to there, the unit looks like a crime scene. “I need lights in the supply room!” Rushing, pointing my flashlight at IV tubing, tiny packages of diapers, an amazing assortment of supplies, all being tossed into bags to take to the Cath Lab Recovery area across the street where the NICU beds and their fragile occupants now called home.

More rushing. “Where should we go?” “How can I help?” Then, minutes later, a call on the radio: “All Directors report to the Command Center.”

[Continued tomorrow.]