It has been a tense week in our area watching and preparing for Hurricane Dorian. While Gary had plans to go inland with Mitzi, he waited as long as possible and, amazingly, conditions didn’t deteriorate as much as local officials warned they could. We all breathed a collective sigh of relief…especially as the images from the Bahamas started flowing in. In the end, Gary felt it was going to be much easier to stay home with all of the equipment already set up to make things more comfortable for Mitzi. What a relief and a great blessing that the storm hugged the coast as close as it did, yet barely impacted most of us. In fact, Mitzi has been sleeping pretty soundly lately, and Gary said the hours of wind and rain bands as the hurricane passed us were no different. What a tremendous blessing!
Right before my family left the beach, the late afternoon before Dorian, there was a beautiful double rainbow that appeared on the horizon over the Atlantic. I hadn’t slept much the past few days as things had been so up in the air with the storm. So the reassuring rainbow, along with the back of a women’s shirt as I stopped to gas up my car before heading out, gave me great peace. Her shirt said, “Relax. No worries; it’s all in God’s hands.” I smiled as I saw it when she was walking into the boarded-up convenience store, grateful for the much needed reminder.
I realized that tracking a natural disaster and trying to predict where and when it will hit shares some parallels with trying to follow the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease. Each person’s storm is different. Each one is unpredictable. No matter how you prepare, can you ever really, truly prepare for the destruction left in the wake of its path? Doctors, like meteorologists, can really only make educated guesses. And, like Alzheimer’s, once you know the storm is out there, there is no way to stop it.
For now, though, I’m so grateful we were able to navigate this latest storm. And that Mitzi was so peaceful through it. Maybe some day science and medicine will find a way to combat both of these destructive furies of nature…????
