The Flood

I'm sure you've heard the phrase, "When it rains, it pours." Well, we had a flood.

Quite literally.

After about an hour and a half of me closing my eyes, I was awakened by pounding footsteps and a door opening and closing, over and over again. Bleary-eyed, I crawled out of bed and trudged halfway down the stairs. It was the same noise over and over again...

Thud.

bang-bang-bang-bang-bang

stomp-stomp-stomp

Creak.

Slam.

stomp-stom-stomp....

You get the idea. As I stood in the middle of the staircase leading upstairs, I watched my mother walk down the hallway with a bucket, throw water from it over the railing outside, and walk toward the basement.

"Ma!" I called as I walked down the rest of the steps. "What are you doing?"

"Oh, don't worry about it. Just go back to sleep," she replied, not straying from her course. I followed her to the top of the basement stairs.

"What happened?" The wet-vac was taken apart and everything smelled moldy and musty.

"We have a little flood in the basement. I'll take care of it." She started down the stairs and I followed. As she dipped the bucket into the water, I noticed that we had six inches of standing water.

I couldn't believe it. Of course, my husband was in the hospital, and I didn't have anyone to help me. I told my mom to go to the hospital to be with my husband and I would call Joe and Shannon, two very close friends of mine that work with my company, Cain Casting & Talent Management. Joe is also an EMT, so I knew he would be prepared for a flood like this.

I picked up the phone to call Joe. When he answered, I lost it. I sobbed that he needed to come over because my husband was in the hospital and we had a flood and bring a pump and on and on and on. I think all he said was "Okay, I'll be right there."

I just sat and cried. It was a couple of minutes after 9am, and the whole cancer thing was hitting me. I had a little more than an hour of sleep, and that hit me, too. I didn't know what to do. I went upstairs, got dressed, brushed my teeth, combed my hair and went back downstairs. Joe and Shannon were already at the door. I showed them the flood.

The big problem was that we had a lot of power cords and outlets under water. The water had to be bailed from the steps, rather than being able to go into the basement and do it. Joe told me that he would handle it. I explained to Shannon what was going on, and made some phone calls that had to be made about my husband. I instructed everyone not to go to the hospital, and I would call if I needed people to go to the hospital. I was very, very specific. I called one of the guys at work to let them know what was going on, and to see if there was anything else I had to do in order to make sure that my husband didn't have issues at work.

That took maybe 20 minutes. After, I sat on the couch with Shannon and told her how angry I was. Joe was still pumping the water out of the basement. My text went off, and my mother texted me that someone showed up at the hospital-- someone my husband hadn't talked with in about 4 years and made crystal clear to me that he didn't want to see.

I told Joe and Shannon that I needed to leave. Joe had gotten nearly all of the water pumped out of the basement, and packed the pump up. The three of us left the house-- They went home and I flew to the hospital.

That flood had been cleared up without issue (although we lost a LOT of our belongings that were kept in the basement, including some of my kids' toys), but - unbeknownst to me - a bigger, figurative flood was right around the corner.