I live in beautiful New Orleans, LA, my home town. I moved back after 10 years Summer of 2005. And I am STILL proud to call it home. I will be forever. My whole family is now back after the storm and it has been great spending time with them. I have the greatest friends ever and the most rewarding career. And last, but not least, my boyfriend Michael is just the best!The following is a depiction of my experience with Hurricane Katrina. These are not news photos from cnn.com. These are my own.
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It was August 28th and I'll never forget my brother waking me up at 4am to tell me my grandfather had just passed away at Baptist Hospital. While wrought with grief, I had no idea what a blessing his passing was, nor what was in store for us the next five days. A few family members had stayed behind to either be with my ill grandfather at Baptist or with my grandmother, who wanted to be near him. It was now less than 24 hours until hurricane landfall and we decided not to leave. We were staying in a living facility downtown for Tulane Hospital students where my brother worked. He had been assigned to stay behind and we were allowed as his family to also remain. We were assured my grandfather was going to be picked up by the funeral home services that Sunday. Sadly, as many other families with loved ones at Baptist, this did not happen. By Tuesday downtown New Orleans was amidst chaos and under water, we stayed away from windows so no one would try to shoot at us or break in. We didn't sleep much in the stifiling heat and nibbled on rations of graham crackers and peanut butter. Thursday morning we raced to the Tulane parking garage to watch the real horrors unfold. Hundreds of patients from Tulane and Charity hospitals were laying on the ground in the 90 degree heat, being fanned with cardboard pieces, and kept alive with hand held ventilators. They were unloaded of the backs of flat bead trucks by sweaty and exhausted hospital workers. I learned that boats were picking up the Charity patients and then they were transfered to a truck at the foot the garage we were in. once unloaded off the trucks, to get the people on the gurneys up the steep ramp to the top of the garage the workers would walk back to get a running start and would run and push the gurney with their shoes flying off they were running so hard to get these people loaded onto the helicopters. There was a little boy, maybe six, in a wheelchair and he was crying and alone. When the workers were not unloading people from the trucks or fanning those waiting on the ground, they would try to comfort him. Mid day came and I need to use the bath room, that is the stairwell. There were urine every where. At one point my mother referenced my grandfather and started to cry saying, "And we have not even begun to deal with this yet". She quickly dried her tears and said, but we have got to be in survival mode, we need to get through this first. My familiy and I didn't talk too much. We wondered where we would go, when would we get out, and then where would go. We lamented that our house in Pass Christian was probably torn to shreds. We hoped that our homes here in New Orleans had not flooded. But no one knew the extent of flooding. And no one outside of the few of us together in the garage knew where we were either. It had been days since we could communicate. Slowly the line would move closer to the edge of the ramp leading to the roof. Slowly as in, we were about 20th in line at 7am, and it was nearing 6pm. I peered around the corner and the line wrapped down the garage. Those people were not getting out today. But we were, they asked for the next 10 people. We walked single file to the roof as the remaining people cheered for us. We waited in a dark staircase with other people already waiting. I watched as my grandmother was loaded on a separate helicopter with my uncle, glad at 90 and an open wound on her leg, she was finally gone. About 30 minutes later we were led to a helicopter and my mind was spinning. As we flew to the airport I peered outside in more horror. I had this immense feeling of relief, we had escaped. At the airport we were led to buses where we were instructed to remove our shoes to be thrown away and that we were going to Lafayette. We were later picked up by my sister. We returned in the coming months to some flood damage in my parent’s house, but as a whole, faired better than others. In March, 2006 we finally held a memorial service for my grandfather, Captain Frank Winter Trapolin, our angel who also stayed behind to lead us to safety
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