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If you thought at all about where you’d like to experience an earthquake, you might imagine a hospital would feel like a safe place to wait it out. But the afternoon the Loma Prieta quake hit, nothing felt safe or predictable when the shaking began. In fact, at 5:04 pm, just before I was due to leave on a week’s vacation from the department where I worked, standing in the hospital was a bit like being inside a giant pinball machine in the moments after the ground began to tremble. Almost immediately, alarms sounded, monitors beeped non-stop, automatic doors clanged shut, and the emergency generators hummed to life. Overhead, lights flashed on and off, and from one of the rooms at the end of the hall, a loud, unearthly wailing started up. I heard one of the nurses attempt to calm the terrified patient whose I.V. pole had toppled, interrupting his round of chemotherapy.

Fifteen seconds is such a brief increment of time, until you are standing in a physician’s small office feeling the foundation beneath you roll violently. Fifteen seconds is long enough to watch the fake potted palm move and gently topple, the vase of purple irises float down from the top of the bookcase to break in pieces on the floor. Fifteen seconds is plenty of time to feel your heart pound, your knees soften to jelly, to see the pictures on the wall tilt to crazy angles while a stack of patient charts falls from the desk into a heap next to your feet.

My main dilemma afterward was trying to free my right hand. It wasn’t pinned; nothing had fallen on it. A doctor, my boss, who’d been complaining to me in his usual patronizing tone, yelled a curse word the moment the floor began to roll and, panicking, grabbed my hand in a vise grip. Earthquakes, I thought, the great equalizer. Now give me back my hand before you break it.