holy earthquake!

I was work when the earthquake struck. Some of the reactions from people around the unit:

• "I'm standing right here!!" -- Patient B bracing the doorway
• "I thought my bed was malfunctioning..." --Patient D.
• "Give me my pain medicine and I'm getting outta here!" --Patient H
• "I refuse to die on 6 Bles!" --Nurse Practictioner K

The nursing staff was sitting in the conference room eating lunch when it happened. At first we all kinda looked around the table like this was our thought process: "what..." -- "do you feel that?" -- "what is that?" -- "what are they moving around upstairs?" --"are they doing construction?" -- "why are the window panes shaking?" -- "is this an..." -- "earthquake!!" After everything settled we were kinda sitting around, debriefing and we started talking about what would've happened. We are on the 6th floor. We have patients who are not ambulatory. The elevators werent functioning for about 30-60 minutes. How could we have dealt with that? Which then sparked the conversation of what would happen during any disaster (whether we had an evacuation plan or not) and our manager simply states, "Yeah, you know I've thought about that before - what would happen if some sort of disaster happened while I was at work... And then you just kind of come to the realization that if anything really did happen - a fire, earthquake, bomb, whatever - you're probably gonna die." ...Such a warm, cozy thought, right? But the more we thought about it, the more we realized its true. It'd be pretty tough to actually evacuate all of our patients (forget about it if you have a time crunch) and we cant leave them, so we're stuck. It still hasnt really hit me that we had that big of an earthquake, but I sure am glad there were no real damages and everyone is safe!