Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

by Sheri Fink

but the hospital’s preparedness plan for hurricanes did not anticipate flooding.

WTH

The flooding plan did not anticipate the need to evacuate. The evacuation plan did not anticipate a potential loss of power or communications.

And more WTF

The Gold Seal was not a rarefied designation. Some 99 percent of hospitals achieved it, and details of their inspection deficiencies were hidden from public view. Most of JCAHO’s revenues came from fees paid by the very hospitals it accredited. In some cases, its survey teams missed serious problems at hospitals that law enforcement investigators later uncovered.

began reading from Matthew: And, behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the ship was covered with the waves: but he was asleep. And his disciples came to him, and woke him, saying, Lord, save us: we perish. And he saith unto them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith? Then he arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm.

Test of faith? I probably would have failed too.

Despite the request, and the fact that executives from some Tenet hospitals, like Atlanta, had already expressed a willingness to provide evacuation support, Tenet officials continued to rely on governmental resources to respond to the emergency. BY

That is fucked up.

His son had taken him to Memorial’s emergency room before the storm for a cough, but the ninety-seven-year-old man with Alzheimer’s disease, James Lafayette, was discharged and had spent two days lying on the floor of Memorial’s lobby before being admitted.

WTF

The difference was that they had requested his services. The doctors at Memorial, as far as Rider knew, had acted without consent.

Referencing Dr. Kevorkian's mission

It said: AS YOU ARE I WAS. AS I AM YOU WILL BE.

Strangers stop As you pass by As you are now So once was I As I am now So you will be Prepare yourself To follow me

The scenario was familiar to students of mass disasters around the world. Systems always failed. The official response was always unconscionably slow. Coordination and communication were particularly bad. These were truths Americans had come to accept about other people’s disasters. It was shocking to see the scenario play out at home.

We think we're so fabulous. Untouchable.

He wanted to help defend Pou and the nurses! It could have been he who was arrested. The only difference, he was convinced, was that the nurses who worked with him to hasten Jannie Burgess’s death had protected him in their discussions with the attorney general’s representatives.

Wow

The sale of Memorial and other Tenet New Orleans hospitals for $56.8 million was to be used to help fund a nearly billion-dollar settlement to end investigations for overcharging Medicare in Louisiana and other states. The hospital system also disclosed that its insurers had agreed to pay the company $340 million for Katrina-related damage and business interruption at five of the company’s hospitals.

The poles of these two axes were known as voluntary, involuntary, active, and passive euthanasia.

I vote voluntary active for me, should it ever come to that.

Physician involvement in killing had also long divided opinion, back to the time of ancient Greece and Rome. Hippocrates’s thoughts eventually held sway, and many medical schools still honor his tradition by having graduating doctors swear an oath descended from the one attributed to him: “I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan….”

I know who not to call...

After Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops were struck by plague in Jaffa, in May of 1799 he told his army’s chief medical officer, René-Nicolas Dufriche Desgenettes, that if he were a doctor, he’d put an end to the sufferings of the plague patients and the danger they represented to the army. He would give them an overdose of opium, a product of poppies that contains the opiate painkiller morphine. Bonaparte would, he said, want the same done for him. The doctor recalled later in his memoirs that he disagreed, in part on principle and in part because some patients survived the disease. “My duty is to preserve life,” he wrote. Less than two weeks later, Turkish troops closed in on their position. Bonaparte ordered that those in the hospital not strong enough to join the retreat be poisoned with laudanum, a tincture of opium. Dr. Desgenettes refused. The remaining fifty or so patients in the hospital, seemingly close to death, were poisoned instead by the chief pharmacist, but apparently he gave an insufficient dose. The Turks found several alive in the hospital and protected them.

Interesting

“euthanasia”—a Greek-derived term (eu = “good,” thanatos = “death”) that English-language writers had for centuries used to mean “a soft quiet death, or an easy passage out of this world.”

Why shouldn't I be allowed to have a good death?

You could never figure out God’s plan. You just had to try to fit into it, like water taking the shape of its vessel.

Love this

DR. JOHN THIELE stood in the crowd, well aware of those repercussions. He had endured an even more punishing year than Pou, although few people had learned about his role in the Memorial deaths, namely that he had injected patients beside her.

Why wasn't he arrested?

The weather was one more punishment to a population fading into the malaise that inevitably follows an early jolt of post-disaster optimism and solidarity, people’s fight ebbing in the face of mounting evidence that rebuilding and repairing would take years, and what was lost could never fully be regained. Whereas the rest of the country had largely moved on, people in New Orleans still spoke of Katrina every day, and not a day went by without the once-innocent girl’s name appearing on the Times-Picayune’s front page, often within stories recounting an outrageous abuse or failure of official power.

Two long ass sentences

mumpsimus.

Why did we celebrate every milestone in life except this one? she wondered. Everyone wanted to be there to witness the beginning of life, but the ratio of birth to death was one to one. She would ask, “If your best one got on the slow boat to China, you would not be at the dock saying good-bye?”

Death was not always the enemy, she felt, especially when somebody was elderly.