Lockdown

That's what I was in last week.
Thursday 9/16 I was in a meeting when I received the following text @ 11:18am "Shooter incident on Nelson 8. Stay in your office or room and lock the doors until the all clear is announced. Stay away from windows. Wait for instructions."
I was with a friend/coworker and we weren't sure what was happening. We ended the meeting and joined some of the other staff in the corridor. We were on lock down.
For the next 3 hours we were essentially locked in our office suite waiting for accurate updated information. We all had the news channels on our computers and were seeing the stream of confusing and often inaccurate information that was being reported.
This is what happened. A patent's son was upset at the news he received in relation to his mother's condition. He shot the physician and returned to her room where he eventually shot and killed her before killing himself.
No one knew that he was contained to the pts room until after the incident was over. We were thinking he was loose in the hospital a la last springs Grey's Anatomy finale. Our office is in the dome building of Johns Hopkins. It's the oldest building on campus and one of the most used entrances. The back of our building faces the Nelson building. There was concern about the windows because we didn't know what side of the Nelson building this guy was on (turns out is was the other side, facing Wolfe St.).
Once we got a message that the situation was contained to N8 we were free to move about the hospital once more. Lunch was my priority at that point since it was after 2pm.
The whole thing was surreal, especially because we could hear the helicopters overhead and saw the footage on the news.
I was able to be online and let me friends/ family know that we were safe. It's amazing all the stories that people were hearing and how wrong the news was at times. My friends were thankful that I could let them know things were ok.
Just another one of those great stories I'll get to tell my grand kids one day.