Journey Home

Here's a little from the novel I am writing. The story is loosely based on my experience in New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina (Two pages now available; click second installment at bottom of page.) Let me know if you would buy my book when it is published. Give me some feedback. I am not yet fully recovered from the financial, spirtual and emotional devastation that happened six years ago.

      As I got closer to the city, I saw that all that the wind had pulled down into the streets was subsequently floated, shoved around, pushed aside and buried under mud by waves of water that filled the city from broken and overwhelmed levees before the streets were hesitantly drained.  Lingering reservoirs of water, dripped over old clapboards, and collapsed gutters, streamed down windowpanes, and gurgled through widening crevices in buildings’ dilapidated roofs. The grass at curbsides was brown, coated with clumped brown sludge.  The sidewalks were the same shade of brown hosting a three inch thick layer of scum.  Electricity had been out in metropolitan New Orleans for five days and was not expected to be back for at least another week.  Local communication was disrupted; no home phones were working, many cellular phone receiving towers were down, only a few walkie-talkies worked in the area.  New Orleans was wounded beyond the physical. It was spiritually and psychically devastated.
       I had rented an apartment just outside the city limits earlier in the year while my house was being renovated. Since the hurricane, the complex had greatly changed. Many of the apartments were rented to out of town contractors who had flocked to the area.  The contractors brought in crews and put them in the apartments; six to eight men occupied one and two bedroom units. The city was under curfew for six weeks after the disaster and the crewmen had no where to go after work so they congregated along the second floor balcony and drank beer and smoked cigarettes until midnight or the crew foreman advised them to go  to bed. I did not feel safe living alone in my apartment.  I jumped at the chance to stay in the army-constructed accommodations for medical personnel in the city park.  It was not particularly comfortable, but it felt safer.
        I had worked in the Armstrong International Airport for two days helping patients who had been evacuated out of Medical Center of Louisiana, referred to as Charity Hospital, while they awaited transfer to an accepting medical facility.  The injured was transported on luggage carts and army stretchers to quiet corners of the ticketing section of the airport.  The immobile was laid on the floor and the walking weary arranged themselves on opened cardboard boxes.   Family members who had stayed with their very ill loved ones showed the signs of extreme stress:  some had diarrhea, sore throats and hoarse voices while others had irritating coughs.  Many did not have their medications so blood pressures and blood sugars were elevated out of control. Few of the transferred patients responded verbally when asked about the condition that hospitalized them; they stared numbly as if speech no longer served them, muted by disenfranchisement and despair. I looked into hollowed eyes, too dry to cry, that reflected different levels of physical pain.  Hospital charts had not been moved with the patients so continuity of care was impossible. I examined poorly bandaged wounds, listened to erratic heart beats and recorded my findings on clipboards provided by the army.  Intravenous hydration with normal saline was started on everyone.  Antibiotics were injected in some.  Triage was done in accordance with army field medicine; the least sick were served first and those most likely to survive received aid before those who showed less promise.  I wondered how this could be medical care in the United States of America in the year 2005.
        This morning, my eyes blinked open a little after three am.  My sleeping bag was uncomfortable and the tent made noises unfamiliar to me.  my alarm clock was not scheduled to go off for another three hours. I was volunteering at the FEMA medical site.  I worked to exhaustion every day, too often feeling jittery and hyper-alert, seeing so much despair was frightening and draining.  I had gone to bed at a little past midnight and three hours of sleep were hardly enough to refresh me for the pending day’s work.  I lay very still, listening and wondering what had awakened me so thoroughly.  Then I heard the deep rumbling of refrigerator trucks rolling in.  They had been sent to the area to be used as storage space for the dead.  Bodies floating in canals, slumped in wheelchairs, abandoned on highways, found in attics, and trapped beneath debris were being collected and transported to the medical station.   Forty five bodies were found in Methodist Hospital.  Thirty bodies were found in a nursing home.  I dreaded hearing the death count announced in the camp at the end of each day. Death statistics announced telling of lives lost on American soil as if there had been a domestic war fought and only civilians perished.
         I turned over on the thin cot trying to will myself back to sleep, soon realizing that it was useless.  Fragments of thought hurtled through my mind like shrapnel, sharp-edged and painful; there were so many bits and pieces; I could not grasp any one of them long enough to make sense of it.  A fierce loneliness gripped me, how could my life come to this.  I had known so many kind people who genuinely cared for me.  Now it seemed that I was alone in the world.  Not even my dog had survived the hurricane.  I  poignantly missed Aero, a faithful canine companion that died in the storm along with the dear friends who agreed to board him.  Their property was flooded and everyone drowned including Aero. My eyes stung with tears as I remembered how Aero and I would go out on the levee for a run when  I awoke before dawn unable to clear my mind or fall back to sleep.