Ask Me Why I Hurt (24 page)

I finished my meal and threw away my garbage. Mary was standing at the counter.

“Good-bye, Mary,” I said, stepping closer. “I want to say that I’m proud of you. I know you’re going to accomplish a lot in life. I hope to see you again.”

She blinked, as if in perfect, calm agreement.

It was now Christmas 2003, and I was attempting to write the yearly letter we sent out to family and friends. The twins were two. I was thirty-seven, and Amy was thirty-six. Three years had passed since I had started the van.

I was trying to sound chatty and funny, but what really seemed to come out was chaos. How could this much have happened in such a short amount of time? Other families seemed to have placid years punctuated by rare moments of upheaval. We seemed to live not in the eye of the storm but in the storm itself. And I wasn’t even writing about all the kids on the van I had seen that year.

I wrote about how in the last year alone we had just moved, from the house with burned tiles on the back porch to an older house in a good neighborhood with decent schools. I wrote about how Reed and Janie were potty training and how they liked to decorate the bathroom mirrors with Amy’s face cream. I wrote how my cousin Annette had lived with us for a while. I wrote about how we had had a flood when we remodeled the new house, and how Amy had changed offices, and how we had taken the twins to Sea World, the Wild Animal Park, LEGOLAND, Disneyland, and California Adventure. All this had been done in some sort of mad dash in one short year in a way I really couldn’t remember.

I also wrote about how Amy was pregnant again. This time the ultrasound had confirmed a girl, alive and well, in her womb. We had decided to name the new baby Charlotte, after my father, whose name was Richard Charles but whom everyone called Charlie. We had already told my dad the name.

I wrote in the letter that Charlotte would be our last child. Was there a note of relief in this statement? I didn’t think so. I was terrified
and didn’t want to admit it. It was our fourth pregnancy in only three years. Amy was already on bed rest with severe nausea and premature contractions, and the pregnancy felt frighteningly like a dark replay of the twins’. I was fighting all the time to keep Amy in bed, waging a battle between her and two needy toddlers who wanted their mommy. I had called my aunt Rose to come help, and I knew I was bossy with her, giving strict instructions she was to keep the kids away from Amy and let her rest. But Amy wanted to get up to attend to their needs. The twins were lucky, I thought. They had no permanent damage from being preemies. I couldn’t say we would be so lucky again. Maybe we had already used up our luck, I thought, putting the pen down. I was afraid of losing Amy, afraid of losing another child, afraid of having to spend more months in the neonatal intensive care unit, all fears to which Amy seemed immune.

As these stresses stacked up, I took odd comfort in Ginger. As she had with the twins, the dog had begun sleeping on Amy’s side of the bed long before we knew she was pregnant. Sometimes when I was anxious, Ginger would come to me and put her head in my lap and look at me with her large brown eyes, and it seemed she knew more than any dog.

A
nother year and a half passed by in a stressful but joyous blur. It was August 2005. The twins were now almost four. After another difficult pregnancy, Charlotte had been born a bit prematurely but had gone home at thirty-six hours old, much to our relief and surprise. She now toddled after the twins, her wide eyes following their every move.

When I stopped at the hospital, the other doctors and nurses were glued to the television screens. Hurricane Katrina was coming. The talk was about levees and flooding. Then the storm hit, and it was worse than anything we had imagined. I watched as the news showed waves battering the coast of Louisiana. Floodwaters rose, and frantic people begged for help on national television.

“We’re talking injured people with no food or clean water,” a man was yelling on the television news. “The situation is desperate.”

That night I could tell Amy knew what I was thinking as we sat down to dinner. She had been watching television too. We talked as she cut quesadillas for the kids and I spooned out some applesauce for Charlotte. I expressed my desire to help. Amy, as always, encouraged me. In fact she said she had been thinking about it all day.

“You are the perfect person to direct a team,” she said with assurance. “You have all the experience on the van. You can deal with lines of patients with all sorts of traumas—minor infections to major emergencies,” she said.

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. I feel the same need to help.” She paused. “I’m a doctor too, honey. If I could be there, I would.”

“You’ll be OK with the kids and everything?” I asked again.

A line of irritation knitted her forehead. “I’ll be fine,” Amy said.

I almost rushed to the phone to call Dr. Redlener at the Children’s Health Fund. He was just as quick to ask if I would lead a team. It was easy to see we all were on the same page and that the situation in New Orleans was dire.

The first step was making sure it was OK with Jan. During the past few years I had been able to hire on Wendy Speck and Michelle Ray as our employees, after HomeBase had announced budget cuts. Without them I wouldn’t have been able to consider the trip to Louisiana. They could help Jan with the van while I was gone.

The next day was spent in meetings with the Phoenix Children’s Hospital. The hospital administrators were more than supportive. They asked only if our plans were in line with response efforts already in place. I told them that Dr. Redlener from the Children’s Health Fund was in close contact with high-level administrations in Louisiana and Mississippi. The Children’s Health Fund had already started working on our temporary medical licenses, and it seemed way ahead of other organizations that were pitching in across the country. The hospital committed itself to a couple of thousand dollars in IV supplies and got ready to send us on our way.

We were expecting a lot of diarrhea and dehydration. Because of the sewage, we also expected hepatitis and waterborne diseases. Thinking about how many infections we would encounter, I decided to call Dr. Mark Rudinsky, a friend of mine in pediatric infectious diseases.

“Keep your cell phone on twenty-four hours a day,” I said, “because I’m planning on calling for advice.”

I formed the team quickly. The first to say yes was a senior resident at the children’s hospital, Dr. Jonathan Lee-Melk. The residency program said it was fine for him to go if the infectious disease team approved him. I approached Mark Rudinsky, the head of the infectious disease team, to ask if I could steal Jonathan. “I’ll let Jonathan go only if I can go,” he said. I was unbelievably relieved and appreciative. Having Mark would be hugely beneficial. Dr. Michelle Wang, who had recently been a resident on the van and was now a fully trained doctor, also joined us. I rounded out the team with Catherine Fogerlie, a nurse and the head of the triage call-in center at Phoenix Children’s. I had never worked with her but got the thumbs-up from lots of people at the hospital.

In the days leading up to our departure, there were dozens of reports of guns and looters. Stories abounded of girls being raped in makeshift shelters and bands of thugs roaming and terrorizing at will. I was having second thoughts. I had three young children. Was it fair to them for me to take these risks?

“This will be one of the more important things you do,” Amy said that night, while I held a sleepy Charlotte in my arms. “Remember we love you and believe in you.” I felt she was giving me courage. “This is one way I can help too,” she said quietly, taking Charlotte from my arms.

I felt especially bad leaving Charlotte. She was just a toddler now, so young to leave for what we estimated to be a three-week trip. I wondered if my baby girl would remember me when I returned. And despite her reassurances, I wondered how Amy would fare.

As much as I wanted to take the van, I knew it wouldn’t make the trip. We had retired our original Winnebago in 2004. Our new van had been acquired from a church health outreach program on the east coast. Like the first, it came needing many repairs. The costs were much lower this time because we were able to move medical equipment from the old van to the new one. But it turned
out the second was just as plagued with problems as the first. There was no way it could make the thousand-mile trip.

Fortunately, the Children’s Health Fund had located a medical van in Arkansas, a brand-new thirty-eight-foot-long mobile medical clinic. It also lent support by sending a driver, Lorenzo. This was another relief. It was nice to know that the team would be able to focus on providing mobile health care without having to worry about finding our way around the blighted areas. We were told to meet the van in Alexandria, Louisiana.

By the time we drove into Alexandria on September 9, only four days after I had decided to leave, our initial excitement was already being worn down by the shock of the hurricane. The city was teeming with refugees from the storm. Everyone looked exhausted. People were sitting alongside cars loaded with belongings. I was warned that the nearby barbecue restaurant was the last one open for hundreds of miles, so we ate barbecue sandwiches and chips and drank fountain sodas under bright lights, on sterile tables. It was impossible to imagine a place without running water for fountain sodas or life without electricity for lights.

After eating and making sure the new van was all packed up, I thought, Finally we’re ready. We boarded the new van, and Lorenzo took the wheel. Twenty minutes later the van broke down. Lorenzo was shocked. Mark jumped out with me at the side of the road. “Randy,” he said, “you
are
cursed with vans.” We called a mobile mechanic, who was able to make it out to us. The news was disastrous: serious axle problems, and we would need a big-rig mechanic to fix them. I was advised to haul it all the way to Baton Rouge.

“You say you’re going to help people?” the mechanic asked with concern. “Let me call a friend at the tow yard. You’re gonna need a flatbed truck for this van.”

We waited for hours in the hot tropical sun next to the van until the tow company arrived. But the driver demanded cash. I had brought a thousand dollars for emergency funds, and now, as I paid for the van to be towed away, it was all gone. Our first
view of the command center in Baton Rouge came as we followed our broken van into town. Huge mountains of garbage were piled everywhere. Garbage service had been suspended along with everything else. In the warm, sticky weather the garbage would soon create health hazards. Circling these mountains of trash were parked ambulances, military vehicles, and groups of soldiers.

Inside the command center was chaos. City workers and volunteers had poured in from all over. AFTER TOUCHING ANY WATER OR SEWAGE, WASH IMMEDIATELY, one sign read. In the middle of this deafening noise I found a woman who had somehow found herself in charge of organizing all medical help for one of the worst natural disasters ever to strike the United States. Everything was so chaotic I wasn’t even sure I was told her name. She was one of the thousands of nameless civil servants who coalesced to help after Katrina, often with no pay or accolades or acknowledgment. She told us what everyone else we talked to was saying: there was no way we could get parts or big-rig mechanics to fix our van.

Later a woman named Sharon came trotting over. She was now an assistant in charge of health services. “I heard about you guys. You know, the city bus system is shut down,” she said, somewhat conspiratorially. “Before all this I worked at the department of motor vehicles. Some promotion, right? Well, I got a friend who runs the mechanics team there. They take care of the entire fleet of buses. I bet they can help.” Miraculously, by the end of the day we had five mechanics swarming around our beached van. They had even brought portable welders. In hours it was fixed. I found it almost unbelievable. We had gone from certain disaster to being fully functional at the drop of a hat.

“Where do you need us?” I went back into the deafening noise to ask the administrator.

“There’s a little town called Angie,” she yelled back. “A radio station up there did an emergency broadcast. Turns out there are a lot of people who need care. They’re about eighty miles north.”

Angie, I repeated to myself.

We drove into desolation. It was as if anxiety had come in with
the storm and were still in the air, pressing down on us. Town after town was darkened from lack of electricity, the flattened houses crowned with broken trees. Entire lots had been swept clean of houses and barns. Exposed basements were like gutted sores where homes had once stood. A fishing boat was perched in a tall tree. A gas station had been obliterated, with only the pumps left standing. Railroad tracks were buckled out of the ground. Massive trees had been jerked from the ground. It was as if giants had marauded the land. In front of one empty lot a handwritten sign said: MISSING: ONE RED HOUSE. PLEASE RETURN. We were close to a hundred miles inland, and still the storm had raged. The devastation was ongoing and relentless. It made me feel dizzy.