Free Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink Page B

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 Orleans, attended private and Catholic schools, and now, with time to talk, they found they had friends in common. The nurses knew Pou’s first serious boyfriend from his work as an anesthetist at Memorial. “If you saw him now!” they teased her. He was a sturdy man with playful eyes, apple cheeks, and a lopsided smile who now had a wife, three daughters, and a graying, receding hairline. Pou took out her lipstick and began applying it. “What are you doing?” a nurse asked her. “It’s midnight! What are you doing?”
    Pou said she wanted to look her best in case she saw him. The nurses laughed and reassured her. He had recently left his job.
    It was hot outside, but cold in the hospital; the plant operations team had lowered the thermostat to make the buildings extra cool while there was still city power. If the hurricane knocked out utilities, air-conditioning would be lost because the hospital’s backup power system wasn’t designed to run it. The nurses knew from previous experience it would heat up quickly. Pou made a few phone calls to friends and family. If anything bad happened, they could find her at the hospital, she said lightly. “What are you doing there?” a friend in Houston asked afterwatching the ominous weather forecasts. “Get out!” But Pou wasn’t changing her mind. “I’m going to stay,” she said.
    As the storm approached, there were about 183 patients at Memorial—a little more than usual due to last-minute storm admittances—and nearly as many staff members’ pets. LifeCare-Baptist had an additional 55 patients, including the ones nursing director Gina Isbell had helped move from the St. Bernard campus. Around 600 staff members had arrived to provide care, along with hundreds of family members and companions. Memorial served a diverse clientele, a short drive to the genteel mansions of Uptown and a half-mile from a public housing project. Some community members had also come for shelter. Administrators tallied the census of humans in the medical center buildings at between 1,800 and 2,000.
    Lightning flashed in the dark night. Rain rippled onto the road beneath the streetlights and beat