Sandy

So, I've been taking a little break while ClinkShrink posts about the AAPL conference.  I always enjoy hearing about what she's learned there.  We both had the pleasure of being in the sky last weekend as we awaited the arrival of Hurricane Sandy, though my flight, the only one heading to the East coast from Milwaukee that was not cancelled,  did not include unscheduled stops in the wrong part of the country.  Clink and I were both pleased to get home, and even more pleased that our region was spared the brunt of the storm.  In 1999, a large tree fell on my house during Tropical Storm Floyd, and I've never liked storms since then.  If there's a post-traumatic tree disorder, I have it. 

So Seaside Height, New Jersey is a place I remember from my childhood.  The day I got my drivers' license, I drove two miles to a friend's house.  She and another friend jumped into the car and said, "Let's go to the beach."  Now I had been a licensed driver for six hours, and we didn't live near the beach.  "No," I said, "too far."  "Oh, come on."  Why not.  We drove to Seaside Heights, played games on the Boardwalk, and drove home.  No cell phones back then.  I dropped my friends off and returned home around 1:30 in the morning (no laws requiring midnight curfews back then, either).  I walked in and my mother greeted me with, "I was so worried, I thought you'd been caught in a flash flood."  Flash flood?  What flood? "It rained," I said.  She stopped and said, "Where were you?"  Ah, obviously someplace where it hadn't rained.  I like that memory and I don't like seeing photos of the rides in the water.  

To all those who are still feeling the effects of the storm, our hearts go out to you.

Thinking About Bellevue

Little did I know as I was writing that last post on Sunday that just a few days later some of the same docs I was listening to and learning from would end up evacuating their hospital. When I read about the desperate conditions at Bellevue Hospital in New York as the storm struck and the remarkable efforts to evacuate every one of those hundreds of patients---without any loss of life, to my knowledge---I was impressed and humbled.

Every hospital and institution theoretically is supposed to have emergency policies and procedures, and is supposed to run occasional disaster drills to make sure everyone is aware of them, but who ever really believes they'll be needed or used? Those kind of large scale, potential mass casualty events seem to horrible to think about or really imagine could happen. Until they do.

There's not much I can do from a distance, but from my brief contacts with the Bellevue docs I know that those seriously mentally ill patients and prisoners received the best care possible under the worst possible conditions.

Let's hope that when the storm clouds clear and the rubble is swept away, the hospital that re-emerges is a newer, better and brighter one. The patients and staff deserve it.
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Addendum from Dinah: there is an article on the Bellevue evacuation here.