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I wrote this for Survival Podcast where I post prepper articles and I added a little more detail for you about the nature of the surgery:

An example of my not being properly prepared when an unexpected emergency happened: This happened when this whole area of a hundred miles or more, mostly north and south and lesser miles east and west, lost power in the evening and no one knew why.

It was hot Texas summer, and a few weeks before this happened, my husband had very bad surgery and he was too weak/sick to stay in a very hot house. This surgery was unusual and most who have it do not survive. The surgeon did a bypass of his aorta artery that goes down the abdomen into his legs, and replaced that aorta with a nylon aorta, so the incision went from his ribs down his abdomen and into both legs.

I had to get him out of the house to a cool place. A neighbor said she talked to her sister who lived about 50 miles west and she had power. We determined to go that direction.

First, I had to gather what both of us needed to exist since I had no idea why power was off so didn’t when it would come back; news from the power company was they didn’t know why it went off and didn’t know when it would come back (strange situation but it happened). It was dark in the house - had to find a flashlight, go upstairs and gather clothes, personal supplies, all his necessary medicines and mine, go back downstairs, still using flashlight, grab a gallon jug of water, some kind of food to sustain us in the car since I didn’t know how long it would take us to get out of the massive car jam of thousands of people trying to get out of the area and didn’t know how far west we would have to go to find lodging once we got in an area with power.

Yes, I was frantic inside the dark house trying to find vital items we needed. I wasn’t even sure where a flashlight was when the power went out. It was pure luck we had a decent amount of cash and the car had just been filled. Without power, gas stations couldn’t pump gas and no ATM machine worked.

It was pitch black outside and no traffic lights. We got on the freeway and it was a nightmare with what seemed a million cars trying to get out of the area. As soon as we could, we took a farm to market road to the west to get away from the cars on the freeway. Going was slow because we didn’t know when we would come to a crossroad since no traffic signals worked so we watched for crossings constantly.

After we made our way west to power, we had to keep going more miles to find a vacancy in a hotel as others had gotten to that area before we did. We lost time because we couldn’t leave the house quickly to get ahead of some of the traffic.

Look at all the mistakes I made - my husband’s life was truly in jeopardy due to my lack of preparation to be able to leave the house quickly with what we needed and we would have been totally stuck in place if the car had needed gasoline. I was prepared for staying in place for a hurricane right then but not for quickly leaving my house. I vowed this would never happen to me again.

Don’t let the above happen to you. You can easily prepare now to leave your house quickly to go to a place of safety. A simple way to do it, is, gather what’s needed for a few days including a change of clothes, every necessary item you would need including water and already prepared food (food items such as those individual packets of tuna, crackers, granola type bars, cheese/cracker packets, etc.), plus a flashlight, pack it in a box and station that box close to the exit you use to get to your car. Make sure you know where a flashlight is in your house and always keep it in that place with good batteries.

After researching, I bought two Life Gear’s Wings of Life survival backpacks. Each is a three day survival pack with food, water and essential survival gear. Won’t list what’s included in them because the list is extremely long; you can look them up on the web if you want to know. There is also room to pack a change of clothes and other items you that are essential to you, such as personal medicines.

These two backpacks are in my most secure room fairly near my front door - the bathroom - that’s the most secure room in my house in case of a tornado. If the house falls down and we’re still alive in the bathroom, we’ve got three days of everything we need in those backpacks - and if we need to leave the house quickly at any time, all we need to do is grab those bags and we’re gone.

I did prepare another bag (on wheels), with more food and a way to warm it - think soup with meat/veggies and instant oatmeal, small can coffee, canned heat and Sterno stove for heating/cooking) and other items (one being camping metal plates/cups/utensils, plus two Melitta plastic filter cones and paper filters to make coffee). That bag is stationed not far from the bathroom to grab and roll out with us and the backpacks.

I wrote this article when my husband was still alive. He lived years after that and died a year ago last August with cancer of the brain.