The last time I posted here was Early April..2011 I was scared of Tornadoes.. I still am concerned thats natural... but after April 27th 2011 I think I "Lived The True Anxiety Nightmare" It was that day that the F5 hit Tuscaloosa Alabama.. everyone knows the name now.. but I live in east Tennessee in Cleveland.. where an F4 and 3 other F3's hit and a couple smaller tornadoes hit on that day.

I had sent my son to school and went back to bed only to be woken at 9:30am to a tornado warning.. as soon as the all clear sounded I went and picked him up.. it was only round 1...

As the day progressed we went to a shelter as another tornado hit then all was calm.. we returned home, had dinner and another tornado warning sounded.. I sent my kids to the closet and watched a funnel forming over my house and pass over our neighbors knocking off shingles and then.. we heard a loud BAM in the distance.. about 20 mins later the power went off...the last thing I saw was our usually calm weather guy Paul Barys, in distress about what was coming saying "It's gonna get worse." It was about 5:30 or so pm...

We packed the kids in the car, grabbed what snacks, drinks, and toys we could and headed to the local hospital.. all I could think was.. they have a basement that is a cafeteria and hopefully they wont mind that we go there.. on our way what we saw was SHOCKING... Lights ripped off the posts, the local Sonic was hit.. trees were down and cars were flung about.. trees snapped in half.. my husband and I agreed that if this was gonna get worse we were right to go, and it confirmed I was NOT crazy.. I saw that funnel form.

We settled in at the hospital.. there were others there.. people who like us had never sought shelter but felt strongly the need to do so. It was one "Code Black" after another.. indicating tornado warnings. I think I never saw the sky so black or heard hail fall so hard.. but I stayed calm.. I didn't want my kids terrified.. some people were crying.. everyone looked worried... at 9pm it got a LOT worse..

They moved us all into the underground hallways and reports were pouring in over cell phones and over the loud speakers.. shortly after 9:30 came a terrible announcement.. "Code Triage" and we all knew something terrible had happened in town somewhere. They had to move us back into the cafeteria after that.. they needed the hallway for the injured who were now pouring into the hospital.

Around midnight the terror finally stopped when the front passed completely through... but up until then the tornadoes had just hit and hit all night... we had no idea if we had a home to go back to.. thankfully we did.. it was not until the next day when my husband and I drove out to see the damage that we realized not half a mile away... our neighbors homes were literally GONE. Their stuff was all in the fields.. forests were piles of twigs..

Our next door neighbors would later tell us how awful the roaring was that night... and not knowing where it was.. was terrible. We lost 9 people in our county that night.. including an infant and a couple teens.. a whole family was wiped out in one home..

After facing this sort of horror.. and the thought still brings tears to my eyes... I have to say it taught me a valuable lesson.. First is.. to listen to your gut instincts... and second is to take action on those instincts. Maybe our house was fine but it would have been much worse to stay in that house without power and be scared because we had no basement... and it could have been us.. we just got lucky.