Hurricane Andrew, 1992

I was 24 years old in August of 1992. I lived in Pasadena, Texas at the time and was 8 months pregnant with my son. I was so busy preparing to be a new mother with my first child. I went to lunch with an old co-worker and she told me about a storm brewing that they thought might “turn into something.” I shrugged it off and continued discussing the baby. I just learned that my son would not “turn” as the doctor’s thought that he would and that my son’s father and grandfather had also been breech births. I was trying to prepare for the fact of a c-section instead of having a natural childbirth as I had planned for most of the year (found out I was pregnant in January). My friend had had 2 c-sections and 1 child naturally. I had taken her to lunch to try to find out what I could expect. I never expected the storm to turn into Hurricane Andrew. I was very shocked when I learned that it had hit Florida as a Cat 5 storm and that crossing land weakened it to a Cat 3 and it was back out in the Gulf. I watched footage of the flattened houses in Florida where Andrew was growing into a Cat 4 storm. I went to the hospital for pre-check-in and talked to them about Andrew. They said it was nothing. The eye for Andrew was very developed while it was in the Gulf. A developed eye is always a bad sign. I had a great aunt that said it was Mother Nature looking to see where she needed to clean up. She hated large cities and thought that Mother Nature saw to it that the population never gathered in one place too many or too long. The eye made me nervous and a few days later I went back to the hospital and stayed there. They asked if I was waiting on someone and I told them that I was waiting for my baby to be born and there was a hurricane out in the Gulf. They had a nurse check me out, told me everything was fine, the hospital was not a hotel and to GO HOME. Hurricane Andrew finally laid waste to Louisiana. I still have newspaper clippings where the storm destroyed the sugar cane crops in New Iberia. This, ironically, was the town that I’d moved FROM before coming to Texas. Andrew became another retired name in the list of storms.