My wife started coughing up blood last week. She had a really unusual event of coughing very hard for about three full minutes, so I figured the coughing had broken a blood vessel in a lung and was causing the hemoptysis (which simply means ‘coughing up blood’. But it’s a fun word.)

Although a little gory, a few milliliters of hemoptysis is not necessarily immediately life threatening… but the underlying cause can be any of over a hundred different things, including cancer and a lot of other deadly and semi-deadly diseases. So we got on the hump and make it in record time to the local hospital, where they did X-rays and a CAT scan and more on that later. In any event, they could not figure it out. So we got Air Evaced to the big hospital about a hundred and fifty miles away. Where we ended up staying for several days. I slept on the floor, which was fine, because I wanted, and in my mind needed, to be with her.

I had about half an hour to get whatever we needed for the journey and stay at the hospital. Home was twenty minutes or more away from the hospital. No way I could get there and get things and get back in time. I would have missed going with her if I’d tried it. (more…)

DisasterEmergencySupplies.com is meant to be an ever-changing site whose purpose is to give people a very personal view of how to prepare for an emergency or disaster, and give you some links where you can look at possible supplies. By ever-changing, I mean we intend to expand it as long as we have the ability to write it.

Emergency preparedness is such an incredibly large subject. To get this website up and running, we have started with some basic elements. We much more in the works. But if everyone did only this much, the people of our nation would have such a better chance of making it through the initial traumatic phase of a catastrophic event. We could also weather local emergencies - which will surely happen in many places during this year - far better than if we do not prepare. At least in my opinion.

And everything in the site is just that… our opinion. You have to decide for yourself if (more…)