A Difficult Month

It probably goes without saying that the past month has been difficult for me and all Tucsonans. It's hard to put those feelings into words, so for the past weeks I've remained silent here on my little piece of the internet.

I thought, at times, about how I'd address the shooting that occurred in Tucson. I'm certainly not as eloquent as many people who have written and spoken since that time. So I'll just tell you a little bit about how my day went and how this has impacted my own life, without worrying too much about how well I'm writing it. So let's begin...

The day prior, Friday, I spent in an all day Management retreat followed by a late dinner downtown with my husband and good friends. We stayed out later than us old folks usually do which turned out to be a blessing in disguise. My husband and I had a long list of errands to run the next day and had planned to eat lunch while we were out before going to the UofA basketball game. We planned to eat lunch at Wildflower (using a Fox restaurants gift card from my husband's parents) which is at the corner of Oracle and Ina. The Corner. However a late night meant a late start for the day so I was in the shower when the shooting happened. My mom actually called as I was drying my hair, to ask what I was doing. She had been concerned when I didn't answer the house phone - I just hadn't gotten to it in time...so when she called my cell her first question was "Where are you? Gabby Giffords has been shot."

That was...not what I was expecting to hear. It didn't make sense for a minute. My husband returned home from walking the dog and we turned on the news. And the computer, and our iPhones trying to find out what happened, who was hurt. I texted friends and coworkers on that side of town (it's the Northwest side) to make sure they were OK. I found out on Twitter she had died, the news confirmed it, then we found out those reports were wrong and she was in surgery. But others had died...so many others injured.

The basketball game was moved to Sunday, we stayed on the couch all day watching the news as more reports came in. Some hopeful - Gabby had made it out of surgery. Some devastating - a 9 year old had died. The first responders saved so many though, and it was somewhat surreal to hear the words "incident command system" spoken during news reports - when we practice these drills at my hospital I always joked my job was to go to a conference room and wear my green vest and authorize payments. Now, it's not a joke...the community had a real emergency and while our hospital was not activated, it could have been. I'm thankful it wasn't - that would have meant more injuries, maybe more casualties.

I spent the following week in Amarillo, TX at training, keeping up with the news via my iPhone and discussing the event with my coworkers that were there with me. The President came to Tucson and I was able to watch the end of his live speech after returning from The Big Texan where I ate too much steak (yet not the 72 oz challenge). I watched it all the way through twice on PBS afterward. My husband had tried to attend but the line had already exceeded capacity by the time he got out of work.

And now here we are, the Safeway has reopened and we've been by that area many times running errands. In my mind it feels like there is a neon sign at that location, but it looks like any other intersection, shopping center. It could be yours.

And that to me is the scariest part, this could have happened to any community.