Five days at Memorial : life and death in a storm-ravaged hospital / Sheri Fink.

This is an absolutely amazing book in the way that Dr. Sheri Fink so vividly describes the tragic events and after-effects of Hurricane Katrina at the Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans. In my opinion, it's a must-read for anyone who ever expects to be a hospital patient anywhere in North America. Hurricane Katrina was an unusual event, but many of Memorial's problems were caused by a failure of disaster planning by the corporation that owned the hospital, by government and by hospital administrators. As recalled by one Memorial doctor, "The doctors at Memorial had drilled for disasters, but for scenarios like a sarin gas attack, where multiple pretend patients arrived at the hospital at once. Not in all his years of practice had [Doctor] Thiele drilled for the loss of backup power, running water, and transportation.... There was little in his personal history or education that had prepared him for what he was seeing or doing now. He had no repertoire for this."

By Monday, August 29, 2005, the hurricane had passed Memorial, leaving it apparently unscathed. Then the flooding began and the situation became nightmarish. Several months before Katrina, a report noted that some critical parts of the emergency power distribution system were located at an unsafe elevation in the event of flooding. It was predicted that power would be lost in the main hospital and that patients would need to be evacuated, but the report was not acted upon because of the expense.

Hundreds of people taking refuge from the storm were at Memorial in addition to the patients, creating more stress for hospital staff. Even pets were brought to the hospital, adding to the problem of food supply and waste disposal, such as two golden retrievers who were the cossetted pets of a respiratory therapist and his wife. The dogs' owners left the hospital after a couple of days and did not take their dogs, presumably to be dealt with by staff. The dogs and many other pets were euthanized.

Hospital staff made desperate phone calls and emails requesting help in evacuating patients, many of whom were critically ill and who required ventilators and other specialized equipment to stay alive. Help was very slow in coming. Soon the hospital had no electricity and the elevators stopped working. Many patients were carried by medical staff down a stairwell lit only with flashlights, then through a 3 x 3 1/4 foot hole in a concrete wall to get to the helipad for evacuation.

On Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - "The sun rose and with it the temperature. The hospital was stifling, its walls sweating. Water had stopped flowing from taps, toilets were backed up, and the stench of sewage mixed with the odor of hundreds of unwashed bodies. Interior corridors were enveloped in darkness penetrated only by dancing flashlight beams. Without working phones, televisions, computers and overhead pagers, information was scarce." Nurses were emptying bed pans out the broken windows and people still continued to wade through often neck-high water to get to the hospital. The morgue had no more space and the deceased were put in the chapel.

The hospital staff who stayed (as many did not, leaving when they could) until the last patient was evacuated were extremely heroic and it boggles the mind to think of anyone enduring such a situation.

According to the book, the most fragile of the patients with Do Not Resuscitate orders were euthanized instead of being evacuated. The last portion of the book concerns charges being brought against a doctor and two nurses for these actions and a grand jury investigation. This topic is still controversial to this day as I found out when I did a Google search of the doctor involved, Dr. Anna Pou.

This post was edited by stacey_mb on Thu, Mar 13, 14 at 9:36