Sunday morning.

My parents leave bright and early for my father's conference in Las Vegas. He goes just about every year and my mom likes to tag along and make it a mini-vacation. I give them both a big hug and a kiss goodbye and told them I'd see them soon. I go about my relaxing Sunday by watching the game, doing some homework and finally going to bed alone.

Monday morning.

I decide to wake up a little earlier than usual and just as most people do, I stayed in bed for a little and scrolled through my social media like it's that morning's newspaper. I opened Twitter, start scrolling through memes, gifs, and then #PrayForLasVegas flooded my timeline. I kept scrolling, and saw the same headlines, "Massacre on the Vegas Strip", "54 Killed 500+ Injured in Vegas Shooting." I put my phone down just for a second thinking, "the odds that my parents were in Mandalay Bay, where this horrific tragedy has occurred, are not that great. Las Vegas is so large, they could have been anywhere."

Immediately after realizing what had happened the night before, I quickly texted my Dad to find out what happened and if they are okay. Not receiving a text message or phone call had me in a panic. At that moment I genuinely was afraid to call them. Getting no message didn’t seem like a good thing. I began to think of every possible scenario of where they might have been. Maybe they were sleeping or they went to go see a show. I figured I would check my parents Facebook accounts, maybe they would post something.

Thankfully, my Mom posted a status letting everyone know that they are safe and that everything is okay. From Rhode Island to Las Vegas, there is a three-hour difference so my parents didn't want to call me in the middle of the night and scare me because I would have had no clue what they were talking about. I was up at 8:30 in the morning when I finally got the call from my mom.

They had been up from 10 o'clock in the morning until 6 o'clock in the morning dealing with the situation. She assured me that they were safe but that they were evacuated from the Mandalay Bay hotel. I have never been so happy to hear my parents voices. At the time, I had no idea how their night had turned out or what they had to experience. I only had seen short articles very early in the morning, that were lacking the details that were revealed over the course of the rest of the day.

At the time of the shooting, they were in Luxor Casino located behind the stage of the Jason Aldean concert that was taking place outside. Luckily, they were inside at the time of the shooting, here is their account of what they had experienced that night:

"We were in the Luxor casino right on the side where the concert was.

We saw a small group of people running in the casino and then the next large group came in running and saying that there was a shooter right outside of where we were. Then the hotel security rushed us all out of the casino to a holding room and we had to wait in there. We didn't know what was going on. A few people started to open the exit door to see what was going on and then we heard people screaming to shut the doors. They had us running again and a security officer said he was going to evacuate us to the lower level parking. While we were outside there were many people crying and running. Everyone was in shock. Dad told us that we needed to get as far away from the hotel as we could. We then kept walking until we came across a 'SWAT' officer holding a riffle telling us not to go to the right, that there was nothing over there but the dead. I can't get that out of my mind. We went to the highway and tried to see what was going on. Then people were coming around saying that there was rumor of additional shooters in other casinos so we wanted to just keep going and walk far away and then large groups of people came by us running and yelled 'run'. So we continued running until we finally found the Monte Carlo hotel and they let us in.They evacuated the whole casino floor also.We were lucky they had a room for us because it was a chaotic night and we were unable to get into our hotel room at Mandalay Bay. We had no idea the magnitude until we went in the hotel room to see the body count continue to rise."

After reading these texts from my mom, I still couldn’t believe that they were actually there and could’ve been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had felt uneasy the next two days after the shooting, realizing that my parents could have been walking to their hotel and may not have made it home.

It made this horrific event so real and so close to home that it made me realize that you cannot go anywhere anymore without subconsciously thinking that something terrible, such as this attack, could happen.I’m so grateful that they are safe and are coming home soon. It’s sad that in this day and age, these kinds of attacks are occurring much more frequently to the point we are becoming desensitized.

The number 58 “doesn’t seem that large”, and 500+ is a number that you can barely conceptualize. This is a horrific massacre that has affected hundreds and hundreds of people, their families, and loved ones. Something needs to change and it needs to happen now.

My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and the victim's families that are grieving over this terrible loss.