Phone rang around 11:15 this morning. It was Annie, my good friend.

After the Joplin tornado hit, I did nothing but watch news day and night and and cry and try to reach Annie to see if she was OK. She lives in Oklahoma near there and it looked like a tornado had gone over her. I hadn’t been able to reach her so last night I managed to leave a message on her son’s cell phone and I got a call from Annie a little bit ago.

She was in St. John’s Medical Center (which was destroyed) for hip surgery when the tornado hit them. She was telling me about concrete and glass flying everywhere and people screaming and crying and babies dying. She was crying as she told me.

Her husband is an RN and he wrapped her in blankets and carried her out of the room. It took an hour or so get people out of the hospital and initially, there were no firemen there because the fire station had been destroyed. The National Guard showed up and her husband identified himself as a Chief Master Sgt. and directed the soldiers in what to do to get things moving. Annie ended up in Springfield, MO at a hospital there. She’s home now, bedridden for 10 days but is alive (thank you, God!).

Annie and I are very close. I had a feeling something was wrong.

I have a feeling of great relief now. And utter sadness at the horror she went through. I could hear it in her voice as she relived it while telling me about it. It had never occurred to me that she might have been in St. John’s or I would have been terrified and would have burned up the cell phone lines trying to track her. So it’s good I didn’t know.