BBC News:
For Renee Smith and her paralysed, cancer-stricken husband Christopher, evacuation was not an option when Hurricane Ian came violently bearing down on their Florida home.
“It would have taken an ambulance, a stretcher, and three grown men to move him,” she said of Christopher, who became paralysed just days before the hurricane as a result of prostate cancer spreading to his spine. “I had no control and it was terrifying.”
Without any other choices, Mrs Smith resorted to desperate measures to protect her husband. She used cable ties and gaffer tape to attach a tarpaulin to his hospital bed in a bid to keep him dry and used his wheelchair to barricade the front door from the 150mph (241km/h) winds.
Even that, she feared, may have not been enough.
“I’m his caretaker, so I stayed,” she told the BBC from her home in Punta Gorda – one of the Gulf Coast communities hardest hit by the category four storm. “I put a life preserver around his neck, kissed him and told him I loved him.”
In Mrs Smith’s case, the danger primarily came from the hurricane’s ferocious winds. Many others were hit by a powerful storm surge.
