The day started like any other.
I was a stay at home mom and had just finished a load of laundry before getting ready to start dinner. When I opened the cabinet to reach a plate, the house closed. It felt like something had hit the ceiling, hard. A moment later there was a huge roar, followed by a shock wave. Kitchen chairs flew across the room and everything cascaded onto the counter. I ran to the living room window and drew the curtains. All I could see was orange, everything was orange. I closed the curtains and opened them again thinking I had to be imagining this. But it wasn’t.
As I looked out the window I realized that the orange was actually a ball of fire surrounding what was left of a 737, which was lying broken, smoke billowing out, across the street and two houses from where I was standing. The houses under the plane were nothing more than rubble. I immediately looked in the distance for my daughter Laura’s school just two blocks away. From what I could see beyond the smoke, it looked fine. The adrenaline took over. We needed clothes, at least for one night and one day for Laura, my husband and my mother who lived with us. We’d need cash, whatever we had in the house, ID, photos, at least some, credit card… At that point I was running from room to room throwing everything I needed on the couch. There was a knock at the door. “We are evacuating the neighborhood,” said a firefighter in full gear. “Take everything you need for the next two or three days.”
You have five minutes.
If a plane crash, hurricane, earthquake, terrorist attack, or medical emergency happened right now, would you be prepared?
Where is your spouse, your children, the other people you love? What if they were injured? Would a doctor know what to do to save their lives, given their specific health care needs? Would the hospital know to call you?
What about your vital documents? Could you find your bank account number, your homeowners policy, and your birth certificate, if you suddenly had five minutes to evacuate?
Most people can’t. As human beings, as much as we realize that we need to be prepared, we are simply not programmed to be disaster oriented. If that’s all we thought about, we’d never get through the day, at least not without living under the bed. The good news is that being prepared doesn’t mean we have to be disaster-oriented. Quite the contrary! It means that if we take an hour or two to prepare now, we can relax knowing that if a disaster or medical emergency ever strikes, we will:
Knowing what to do Knowing what to bring Knowing where everything is Knowing that we have done everything possible to not only survive, but also to thrive
And isn’t that the point? Having lived through a plane crash in the neighborhood, a tornado, and a few medical emergencies, we can definitely tell you that it is! In recent years, more than any other, our nation and our world have faced more natural and man-made disasters. The only good thing about this is that we can use the lessons learned during Hurricane Katrina or the floods, the tornadoes, the tsunami or even the London attacks to make sure our own families are prepared.
We are not just talking about disasters. Think about it for a moment. If someone is in a car accident on the way home from work and is rushed to the emergency room unconscious, the doctors treating them are looking at a blank slate. They have no information on their patient, other than obvious injuries. They have no idea what he might be allergic to, what medications he is taking or the fact that he had surgery the month before.
Doctors can gather about 75% of a patient’s history by examining him. But what about that other 25%? What if that 25% is the difference between life and death? When it comes to you and your family, it’s up to you to fill in that missing piece BEFORE an emergency strikes. You need:
- find out what you need
- Find all that information or those documents
- Fill out or create emergency contact forms
- Format and secure your vital documents
- Formulate your family’s emergency plan
- Speed up your family’s emergency treatment
And make sure that if you ever only have five minutes, you can grab what you need and go.
Our family survived the plane crash that day. Those across the street did not. We were and continue to be very wounded. But those five minutes of grabbing what I could, were some of the most stressful and difficult I’ve ever experienced.
We’re here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be this way.