Five Days At Memorial

Five Days At Memorial

Adult nonfiction
"Nobody wrote it directly in a message, but some employees began
to worry that the choice of which patients went out first could affect
their medical outcomes. A realization dawned on Memorial's incident
commander, Susan Mulderick, that day. The variability in the sizes of
the helicopters that were landing and the length of time it was taking
to move patients to the helipad left her with one conclusion: not all
of the patients would be getting out alive."
That is one beautifully crafted paragraph, in three terse
sentences building up suspense and a sense of impending doom. You may
very well think I have my hands on Stephen King's latest. The plot
could have come from his dark imagination. A large metropolitan
hospital is brought to its knees by a hurricane followed by severe
flooding. As all the necessities of patient care--electricity, clean
water, sanitation--become unavailable, staff frantically try to get
their fragile charges evacuated. Rescue is too slow. Patients die,
some drugged into that last night by staff wanting to end their
suffering.
I wish it were fiction. The most terrifying thing about Sheri
Fink's Five Days At Memorial: Life And Death In A Storm Ravaged
Hospital is that it's carefully researched and drawn from real life.
The setting is New Orleans' Memorial Medical Center, ravaged by
Hurricane Katrina. Emergency preparedness as a hospital mandate was
then in its infancy and more centered around acts of terrorism than
natural catastrophes. It was also often a matter of filling in the
paperwork for reaccreditation. Not surprisingly, everything that
could go wrong did both inside Memorial and in its communication with
agencies in the outer world.
Five Days At Memorial is riveting on so many levels. The well
written narrative, which additionally covers the legal aftermath, is
as suspenseful as fiction. Helpful background information is segued
in unobtrusively. Characters are well fleshed out so that you get a
real sense of them as people and their struggles to cope with a once
predictable world horribly out of control. Moral and ethical issues
such as triage in the face of limited resources and mercy killing to
prevent suffering are discussed thoughtfully.
Five Days At Memorial is not a book to read and maybe chat up
with your book club and forget. It should make us all think on two
levels.
The first is that there is a need in most of the cities and
towns where we live to carefully scrutinize our institutions and
emergency procedures. Will they fail us when the catastrophe is up
close and personal? We must look beyond the resources and policies to
the more intangible aspects that effect how we act whether we are
willing to acknowledge this. As Fink says, "Emergencies are crucibles
that contain and reveal the daily, slower-burning problems of medicine
and beyond--our vulnerabilities; our trouble grappling with
uncertainty, how we die, how we prioritize and divide what is most
precious and vital and limited; even our biases and blindnesses."
The second is that while we are relatively healthy is the time
to plan advance directives and put it in writing. Our nearest and
dearest, if they're anything like mine, will be more likely to be all
"la la la not listening" than "Gee, thanks, Mom." You can change your
wishes as you evolve. But one of the kindest things you can do for
them is to spare them from making heart wrenching future decisions.
On a personal note, one of my most vivid childhood memories involves a
hurricane. My family lived on the coast. Mom was preparing for
disaster by lugging our valuables to the cellar along with food,
bedding, and other supplies. Dad was arranging the managerie, making
sure predators were not in striking distance of prey. Harriet was
behaving, probably terrified. On retrospect my bouncing all over
exclaiming gleefully that we'd get to sleep in the basement was
probably not all that helpful. The next morning the parents told me
to go to school. En route I saw a tree down across a street and fire
spitting snakes thrashing around it. I ran back home. Maybe I'd get
in trouble but those snaked were too scary. Being disobedient payed
off big time. Those were downed power lines.
A great big shout out goes out to all the folks who work on real
disaster preparedness when they have the luxury of time.
Julia Emily Hathaway



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