Free Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink Page B

for that impressed
     those around her. These patients were dealing not only with cancer, but also the way
     it deformed their faces. Some coughed and sputtered and had a hard time speaking.
     Pou split her time between several hospitals. At Charity, she created a clinic for
     low-income patients with head and neck cancers to receive advanced treatments and
     reconstructive surgery. She convinced an array of doctors and therapists to provide
     these services without receiving additional pay.
    On January 15, 2005, Pou attended an annual banquet at the RitzCarlton in New Orleans
     to celebrate the installation of Memorial Medical Center’s elected medical staff leaders.
     The festivities took place under crystal chandeliers. The Blackened Blues Band belted
     out rock, blues, and soul music. Giant trays of oysters and shrimp balanced on the
     banquet table beside bouquets bursting with lilies, birds-of-paradise, andirises. Dessert tables adorned with Mardi Gras beads, masks, and candles held trays
     laden with tarts.
    Pou wore a short-sleeved pantsuit with a double strand of pearls and pearl drop earrings
     and a sleek, chin-length hairstyle. She spent the evening socializing with other members
     of the medical staff and their spouses, flashing her broad, toothy smile for the event
     photographer.
    The doctors’ lavish party contrasted with the troubled state of Memorial’s parent
     company, Tenet Healthcare, which owed hundreds of millions of dollars in fees and
     settlements for allegations of fraud and unnecessary surgeries at other hospitals.
     Tenet faced falling stock prices, multibillion-dollar operating losses, a federal
     lawsuit for overbilling Medicare to inflate revenues, and a class-action lawsuit by
     shareholders for allegedly having misled investors. As part of an aggressive shift
     away from this troubled history, Tenet had moved its corporate headquarters from California
     to the Gulf South in Dallas, andwas in the process of selling twenty-seven hospitals that weren’t meeting financial
     goals.
    The doctors affiliated with Memorial followed the news, but they still hadmuch to celebrate. Only three years after the hospital’s new surgery center opened,
     executives had recently cut the ribbon on a new, $18 million cancer institute across
     the street from the main hospital. They had also completed a $5 million renovation
     of the labor and delivery center. Memorial had passed a midterm hospital accreditation
     survey, and it boasted some of the highest employee satisfaction rankings of any of
     Tenet’s dozens of hospitals in several states. For the staff at Memorial, the year
     2005 looked bright.

    POU HAPPENED TO BE on duty for her department when Katrina threatened, meaning she
     was expected to stay for the hurricane. Dr. Dan Nuss, the department chairman, called
     her, concerned. “I think this is the real thing,” he said. None of their postsurgical
     patients, spreadover several area hospitals, were terribly sick. Nuss urged Pou to sign out the patients’
     care to other doctors. Pou’s husband agreed. Two resident physicians were on call
     with Pou that weekend. She dismissed them so they could be with their families. “Leave
     town,” she advised them. At four p.m. on Sunday, the National Hurricane Center warned
     for the first time that battering waves and a mountain of water forced up by Katrina’s
     winds—towering as high as twenty-eight feet above normal tide level—could overtop
     some levees protecting the city. Pou had resolved to stay in case anyone trapped in
     the city needed the kind of specialized care she and few others could provide. Pou’s
     department did most of its roughly 1,000 surgeries a year at Memorial, and she decided
     to base herself there.
    As the surgical staff hunkered down that Sunday evening, the endoscopy suite they
     had claimed for quarters took on the atmosphere of a slumber party. Many of the nurses
     and Pou were coevals. They had grown up in New