Anna sat down and talked with her about Aunt Jay and she seemed to do a bit better after that. I kept her updated on things and read all the cards to her and just kept her in the loop. Today she is very well. Dad was very upset when we told him about Jay. He did well at the funeral and I am not too sure if he still realizes that she died. He walks past the room she was in and tells me "there was a lady in there, but she isn't there any more." I just say, "yes there was" and he then talks about something else.

Then just a few days later there was the Katrina hurricane. We weren't impacted on a personal level, but my hospital was.  We took in about 30 patients and other parts of my office area were busy (I share office space with our Risk Management dept and they get to deal with alot of the legal issues with the patient's like how to treat them if there isn't any parent to give permission. Lots of the kids we got, their parents were evacuated to another area or even state.), but the Safety dept was not busy with those folks at all.

We of course, just got through with Hurricane Rita. Anna and I made the decision not to move Mom and Dad. We are not in the area of the city that was under mandatory evacuation and we are not in a flood zone. Anna did a wonderful job of accumulating supplies (depends, wipes, gloves, food, etc) for us and we both prepared both homes for the storm. All in all, the storm was pretty uneventful.

At my house (which is 7 blocks from Anna's) we had the cable go out at 8pm on Fri (it got back on Sunday) and we had quite a few small power outages that only lasted a few seconds. At Anna's house, they lost power at 3 am Sat morning and it came on at 8 am and then off again at 9am, then it was back on for good at 1pm. So they had about 8 hours of no power, but all was good. Anna stayed at the house to ride out the storm and Liz and her family was there too. Jerry and I and our friend Buddy (he lives near NASA and was under the evacuation) rode it out at our home.

We really didn't have any damage to any of our homes, just some tree limbs that fell. In fact, we only got about 1/2 of rain during the entire storm. We still had to water the grass after the storm. Jerry has two co-workers that live near where the storm made landfall and they had some damage and currently have no power or water. Other houses in the neighborhood had some fences blow down, and there were some uprooted trees.

Our biggest issue during the storm was that Sara, our nurse, decided that she was evacuating on Friday at 11:30 am. Anna and I pulled all the day shifts until she returned late Sunday. But Anna and I did well. We didn't break Mom and Dad. Liz did the nights and things are back to normal. Sara really did freak out though. She told us she would be to work all the days and then on Fri, she was supposed to work Fri, Sat and Sun 7am to 7pm. She gave Mom and Dad a bath and just left. She told us she was going to a friends house just a few miles away, and ended up going to Austin. Overall, it was better that she left. She was getting Mom and Dad nervous. 

Where Anna works, gave them off until Wed. I had to return to work on Monday. It was a busy Monday, so I didn't get this e-mail out to you yesterday. Gary (a co-worker) and I had to save the hospital from a "suspicious" letter which was leaking a brown powder. Turned out a vendor sent out a letter notifying the hospital of a name change in their company, and they sent a package of M&M's as a treat. Well, the M&M's got crushed during transit and the heat melted the chocolate and the bag oozed chocolate out the envelope at the flap and was also dumping the "brown powder." Our Security Dept called Gary and myself along with 3 off duty Houston Police officers (which work here) to look at the envelope. Oh, it is so much fun sometimes in the world of Hospital Safety! But all is good here at the hospital. We didn't get any wind damage at all.

Not much else happening here. Since Anna is off today, I have her taking M&D to see Dr. D for their monthly doctor visit and to get their regular blood work done.

Love and hugs, Mary