It’s late at night, July 19th, after another exhausting 15 hours in the ICU I am back in my hotel room to jump into a hot shower. I get into my pajamas and finally lay my head down on the pillow.
I was glad the day was finally ending. It is totally quiet in my room, but the sounds from the beeping machines keeping my husband alive echo in my mind. I am trying hard to push those noises aside and allow the peace and quiet that surrounds me to take their place. My eyes are getting heavy to begin recuperating from the exhausting day.
Suddenly, a deafening alarm begins to assault my peace and quiet! My eyes pop wide open, my body jumps and I find myself on the floor wondering what in the world is going on. Quickly, I realized it was a fire alarm and we were being told over loudspeakers to exit the hotel immediately! I have to be honest here… I was so tired all I wanted to do was to climb back into bed and close my eyes, thinking surely, it’s just a drill and if not, it can’t be on my floor.
Fortunately, the sound of the alarms drowned out any and all thoughts of staying in the room. I grabbed my cell and out the door, I went along with dozens of other fleeing hotel guests.
“Do not use the elevators! You must use the stairs!” The alarms wailed with a whoop, whoop, whoop type sound. “Attention, all hotel guests, evacuate immediately!” Whoop, whoop, whoop. The alarm was almost worse than staying in a burning hotel! We reached the main floor and were met with fire trucks outside the entrance doors.
With tired eyes, we are all strangers looking at one another trying to figure out if what we just experienced was real or just a figment of our imaginations. Our hearts racing, breathing like we just ran a marathon. We tried to settle down to take it all in. After about an hour we were finally allowed back into our rooms when they revealed it was a kitchen fire. All clear. We could relax.
My husband was a Fire Protection Engineer and if he could have been there, he more than likely would have been able to describe the cause of the fire as being a grease fire in the exhaust due to lack of proper maintenance. It made me think about how much I had learned from him over the years. He had been my personal ‘Google’ search engine and I couldn’t imagine life without him.
For a brief moment the fire, the alarm, all the other hotel guests, the fire trucks and the men, took me out of my life’s crack and strangely made life seem normal. It ended quickly as my mind went racing back to the ICU, knowing my sweetheart was in the fight of his life.