Hurricane PTSD
What every Floridian lives with, at some point.
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author who is also librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
I got mold poisoning after the ‘canes of ‘04. It was the least of my worries.
When I say “we lost everything” due to Hurricane Charley, it’s a little bit of hyperbole but also entirely accurate. We lost clothes, furniture, our computer, and a place to live.
However, we had just been renting a room at the time (things were rough for us after 9/11) so most of our things were in storage. We did not lose everything, just everything we actually needed.
Charley ripped all the shingles off the roof and lifted up a good number of the plywood sheets from the rafters. In the end, nearly everything inside the house got water damage. Including the humans.
FEMA came through with enough money to buy a new mattress and some clothes, but we had to live in the ruin of the home we were in for a couple of weeks until the landlord scraped together “alternative housing.” The mold started creeping down the walls of the essentially roof-less building within days as we took turns sleeping on the one side of the mattress that was not wet from water damage.
I started coughing before the week was out. We had no money for a doctor.
Eventually FEMA set up emergency clinics, and I managed to get to one. The doctor wanted to put me in the hospital, I think because my oxygen was low, but I refused. Stupid, I know but: again, with what money? So I got a run of anti-mold meds and, fortunately, lived to tell the tale.
That whole experience haunts me, though. I know people who survived Hurricane Andrew (1992) who are similarly haunted. That kind of trauma fades but never disappears.
Here comes Idalia.
People think surviving a hurricane is dramatic, and that’s true. It’s messy and scary as things fall apart around you and there is no place you can run to hide because you are already there. It’s going to be your salvation or your grave, what ya gonna do?
The aftermath is often worse, though, especially for people without a lot of resources to start with. Mold, wet mattresses, no refrigeration, no A/C, and omg the smell. THE SMELL. The stink of death — all the birds and squirrels and deer and abandoned dogs who did not find shelter — hangs in the air for weeks.
We lived! Ha ha! Isn’t that hilarious?
I joke about it now, but that’s definitely a trauma response.
The ‘canes of ‘04 (Charley, Francis, Ivan…names burned into my brain) destroyed the the meagre financial recovery we were trying for in the years of destitution post-9/11.
There was nothing left for me in Central Florida, both literally and figuratively. I got a shitty car I bought off a fellow taxi driver and I headed to Tallahassee. I think in the end, Charley was a major contributor to the disintegration of my marriage, since we were never able to get back on our feet afterwards.
All of which is to say, Hurricane Week always makes me tense and distracted. Anxiety to the max, even if I’m not actually scared of the incoming storm.
I’ve got my doritos, and Keely has plenty of dogfood and peanut butter.
I’ll let you know how it goes.