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

by Sheri Fink

Concepts of triage and medical rationing are a barometer of how those in power in a society value human life.

This concept was also elegantly expressed many years earlier by the author C. S. Lewis, who wrote: There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there can ever be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain.

The stress of the disaster narrowed people’s fields of vision, as if they wore blinders to anyone’s experience but their own.

Sometimes the ethical—the most important ethical question sometimes is the one you ask not at the moment of crisis, but the duty you have to anticipate certain kinds of crises and avoid them.”

Life and death in the critical first hours of a calamity typically hinged on the preparedness, resources, and abilities of those in the affected community with the power to help themselves and others in their vicinity. Those who did better were those who didn’t wait idly for help to arrive. In the end, with systems crashing and failing, what mattered most and had the greatest immediate effects were the actions and decisions made in the midst of a crisis by individuals.

Writer DM Edwards of Marrero, who described having worked at another New Orleans hospital during the disaster, wondered exactly whose pain the medical workers had been trying to relieve: “Our whole purpose for being here was to aid the patients; not to kill them because we wanted them out of our misery.”

“Might we all make questionable judgments if we were hungry, dehydrated and sleep deprived?” asked a writer who self-identified as a doctor in Kansas City.