Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (25 page)

The lieutenant on the phone asked Mulderick whether the hospital had water and food. When she told him it did, he said he needed to pull helicopters away for a period of time to rescue people stranded on rooftops, something that had been more difficult to do overnight in the dark. Coast Guard pilots, entering New Orleans airspace at night on the way to Memorial, had seen what appeared to be a sea of light through their night vision goggles. With no streetlights or headlights, every source of those lights likely represented a person with a candle, flashlight, or lighter, signaling for help. Additional search-and-rescue assets were being sought from around the nation. The number in the area was inadequate to the need. Pilots nearing Memorial could see people desperately waving their arms and flapping sheets and towels out of the windows of a nearby apartment building and from the back of a flooded pickup truck. Near the intersection of Claiborne and Napoleon Avenues, some people attempted to wade through rainbow-sheened water nearly up to their necks, pushing tires and coolers ahead of them as flotation devices.

Private air ambulance companies now had to request special permission to enter the New Orleans airspace, and those present were focusing on critical patients at other hospitals. Even as the number of aircraft operating over the city grew, the limited or absent air traffic control radar and air-to-ground communications, and the presence of aboveground power and phone lines, made flying extremely dangerous. Only a few private and military choppers arrived at Memorial on Wednesday morning after daylight. Some of the pilots seemed to be under the mistaken impression that only a handful of patients remained. Several National Guard pilots landed to
drop off
patients at Memorial.

At least the Coast Guard emergency radio proved helpful. To conserve its batteries, every hour, at a quarter to the hour, the nurse who was also an Air Force Reserve captain asked someone to find the CEO and Susan Mulderick and see if the hospital needed anything. She then turned on the radio, checked in with emergency officials, and made requests for supplies, which helicopters dropped on the pad. Later, someone took the radio and gave Memorial two satellite phones to use instead, but nobody could make them work. Reliable communications with the world outside were lost.

Overhead, the sky pulsed with a war-zone soundtrack of low-flying aircraft. During the day President George W. Bush, too, cutting short his Crawford, Texas, ranch vacation two days after the storm, overflew the devastation in
Air Force One
on his way back to the White House.

Inside the plane, photographers Jim Watson and Mannie Garcia captured the president in profile as he leaned toward a window. Daylight sharpened the maze of creases on his face and illuminated the frown on his lips. Another photographer, Susan Walsh, caught the president from a different angle, behind a shoulder of his monogrammed blue flight jacket as he rested on crossed forearms, gazing out at a body of water, hands balled into fists.

Some would later accuse
the president’s peregrination of grounding rescue flights. Exceptions to presidential airspace restrictions were, however, typically granted for lifesaving medical flights. Whatever its causes, the slowdown in the arrival of rescue helicopters compared with the previous day frustrated the staff and volunteers on Memorial’s helipad, who were now organized, eager to work, and surrounded by patients awaiting transport. A doctor on the helipad aimed his Treo cell phone skyward and snapped a picture of what appeared to be the Boeing 747 body silhouetted against bright clouds as it glided overhead, less than half a mile above the hospital.

GREEN VINES SPILLED over the side of a smoking balcony, where several people watched as evacuees were helped down from the top of the emergency room ramp onto the bow of an airboat. Other onlookers took to hospital windows, and still others watched suspended from a double-deck bridge over flooded Clara Street.

Each of the two airboats fit three or four people in addition to its pilot. Several adult patients whose breathing relied on a tracheostomy—a surgical hole in the neck—or who had cancer went aboard, including the two relatively young people who had recently received bone marrow transplants and whom Memorial staff had hoped to transfer out on Tuesday. They were highly susceptible to infections but were able-bodied enough to wade through shallow water at the drop-off point. They and the other passengers put on earmuffs or stuffed their ears with gauze to protect against the din of the airboat propellers.

An aluminum flatboat, its motor singing a gentler vibrato, took five newborn babies cradled in slings against their mothers.
A World War II veteran with leukemia, who had once seen an American ship explode at sea, put on his Merchant Marine cap for the journey. A young man warned him to take it off so the wind wouldn’t steal it as they shoved off from shipwreck Memorial.

Nurse manager Karen Wynn didn’t like to pull rank or beg favors, but she was determined not to let all the first boats leave without her other
pregnant ICU nurses. One, less than a month from her due date, had started having contractions the previous day, but she resisted getting on a boat without her grandmother. Her colleagues told her she had to go. Wynn said she couldn’t put her unborn child at risk for the sake of the elderly woman. Wynn and nurse Cheri Landry would look after the nurse’s grandmother and an elderly aunt who had also accompanied her. The nurse climbed aboard.

The giant fan at the back of one of the airboats roared. Its pilot, high above his passengers on a metal chair, steered through the murky water on Clara Street, leaving a small wake. The boat floated past the domes of
several vehicles in the parking lot of Memorial’s Cancer Institute and a trunk door that had popped open in the water. Where the hell her nurses were heading, Wynn had no idea. Somewhere, she thought, somebody out there has this organized, has this under control. She was sure.

At the drop site, the airboat pilots transferred these first evacuees into waiting ambulances and began the more than three-mile journey back to Memorial. They glided slowly to avoid hitting debris. The round-trip took more than an hour.

Sandra LeBlanc scouted out a closer dry-drop location near a Rite Aid and a Copeland’s Restaurant nine blocks south of Memorial. Along the city’s southwest border, the “sliver by the river” was dry, and it connected to roads out of town. The airboat pilots, whose efforts were soon bolstered by the arrival of a much larger vessel, began ferrying people to the new site, but they found no ambulances there. Perhaps nobody had tried to get a call through and redirect them. Also, disembarking there required wading through dirty shallow water to dry ground.

The evacuation strategy underwent another subtle shift. Now only the relatively few patients who were well enough to be discharged were put onto the boats. Several doctors had taken over loading the boats, trading the hot hospital and its very sick patients for the open-air emergency room ramp, where they oversaw the process. They began allowing hospital employees to leave along with their own and the patients’ family members, hundreds of whom still remained at Memorial. The evacuation line wound from the ramp back through the emergency room and into the hospital’s reception area.

As they neared the boats, many people asked questions of Karen Wynn. “Where we goin’? Where we goin’?” She didn’t know where. It frustrated her when people on the cusp of freedom suddenly hesitated to leave the hospital. They seemed more comfortable with the hell they knew than with the unknown journey that awaited them. One woman refused to get on a boat when told she couldn’t bring her purse for space reasons. Her and her husband’s “whole life” was in that purse, she said,
and she was willing to be separated from him, a discharged patient, to hold on to it.
Give me the fricking purse!
Wynn wanted to tell her. Wynn offered to take responsibility for it, as she had taken responsibility for the pregnant nurse’s grandmother, if that would convince the woman to go. But it didn’t. The woman wasn’t having it. She would not give up the purse, and so she wouldn’t leave.

The stress of the disaster narrowed people’s fields of vision, as if they wore blinders to anyone’s experience but their own. Again and again, Wynn saw signs that others were not appreciating the gravity of the situation inside Memorial. Early in the morning, an outpatient somehow made it through the floodwaters to the hospital for a regularly scheduled chemotherapy appointment. The water had stabilized at about five to six feet around the sloping hospital grounds; the feared additional fifteen feet had not come. “Sweetheart, we’re not giving chemo today,” Wynn told her.

A representative of the Women’s Hospital in Baton Rouge called Wynn to complain that a male psychiatric patient from Memorial had been transported there along with the neonates on Tuesday.
Just what do you want me to do?
Wynn wanted to ask. The staff at Women’s could simply put him in an ambulance and send him to a hospital that accepted men. At least she assumed they could. She wasn’t thinking about how many patients from New Orleans might have been dropped in the capital. She couldn’t imagine the situation outside the walls of Memorial was anywhere near as bad as it was inside them.

While the boats made runs to dry ground with hospital staff and family members, Wynn helped care for the patients categorized as 1’s from LifeCare and Memorial who had been carried down to the first floor in anticipation of rescue. They waited on the down-sloping sides of the ambulance ramp, the brakes of their wheelchairs locked. Throughout the hot afternoon, Wynn memorized the faces of her “little bodies” so as not to lose a soul, and then an unfamiliar one appeared. Where’d he come from? she wondered. He’s not one of mine. The man was wet,
and she noticed a dialysis catheter hanging from his chest just below one shoulder. It dangled from him, lacking the protection of a sterile dressing. The man told Wynn he lived in the neighborhood, had stayed for the storm, and was overdue for a dialysis treatment. As it was a matter of life and death, he had waded to Memorial in the foul, chest- or neck-high brew; Wynn could only imagine what little trolls had trekked into the catheter, which opened into a major vein, putting him at risk of a deadly blood infection.

Wynn called out to one of the doctors manning the boat launch. “Dr. Casey?” She pointed to the man. “Dialysis. He’s gotta go. He’s gotta go on the next boat.” She had no idea what awaited the man at the other end of his boat ride, but she prayed she was giving him a chance to survive.

SOMETIME ON WEDNESDAY, people on the ER ramp noticed the strange sight of a mattress floating up Napoleon Avenue. The mattress made a turn onto Clara Street and neared the hospital. On it lay an ill-appearing black woman, with several men swimming through the fetid water, propelling her. “The hospital is closed!” someone shouted. “We’re not accepting anybody.”

René Goux, the hospital’s chief executive, had decided for reasons of safety that people approaching Memorial should generally be directed to the dry ground at Napoleon Avenue and St. Charles Avenue nine blocks away, the same place Sandra LeBlanc had identified for discharging boat passengers from Memorial. Even the previous day, the Coast Guard auxiliary member in Alexandria had instructed Memorial staff by phone to secure the premises, station men at the doors and windows, and bar entry to anyone not in uniform. Nonetheless, after a heated exchange, a sympathetic doctor convinced administrators to take in the woman and her husband, but the men who’d swum in the toxic soup to deliver her were told to leave. The woman was lifted onto a stretcher and moved
indoors into the emergency room hallway. Whadda we have here? Karen Wynn wondered. It was all well and good of the doctors to insist on accepting this patient, but now somebody had to care for her. Wynn had more than enough work with her charges on the ambulance ramp. Still, she couldn’t leave the situation alone. She had to go inside and see about this lady.

The gaunt-faced woman, wrapped in covers on a stretcher against the wall, looked dead. Wynn pulled back her covers to assess her. The elderly lady was still breathing, but barely. She was emaciated. Her husband, who had arrived with her, told a confused story that suggested his wife had been in hospice care, suffering from some condition from which she was expected to die soon.