Day 1
Friday the hurricane hit. Rain and wind pounded the apartment. I had to deal with the front door leaking and the ceiling leaking but luckily little else. I watched movies and ate the last of my refrigerated food in preparation for the power going out. Later in the evening, the wind shifted and began throwing rain at the bedroom windows. Water sprayed from the bottom of the window sills with every gust. The light rubber seal at the bottom of the windows, normally enough to keep rain out, could not stop it when backed by hurricane force winds. I placed towels on the sills to sop up the water and stop it from spraying into the room. They get quickly became saturated with water. I knew I had to seal the windows somehow. With water all over the place, duct tape wouldn’t stick. I grabbed two trash bags folded them into a strip long enough to reach across the window sill, placed them under the window, and closed the window on top of them. The water stopped spraying.
In a moment of celebration, I grabbed the soaked towel and hurried to get it to the bathroom before it leaked too much water on my bed. My bedroom window was over my bed so to reach it I had to stand on my bed. As I ran off my bed, the bedspread flipped up off the corner of the mattress and over my foot grabbing it. I fell forward almost as flat as a plank. My knees hit first and hardest. The rest of the impact was taken by on my hands and chest. As I fell, I knocked over a stack of clothes and blankets from a chair and they buried me on the floor.
I laid there for a minute feeling the pain in my body, the ache in my knees, the sharp pain in one toe that hit the ground, and the bruise to my ego. There was no one else in the apartment. There was no one who would check on me for days. There was no one I could call. If I had taken the fall worse, broken a bone or hit my head on the floor, I would have been alone to deal with it or possibly die. I pushed the clothes and blankets off me and sat on the floor. I checked my toe for a break but it seemed fine. Carefully, I stood and walked the dripping towel to the bathroom, very aware of how lucky I had just been.