Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (7 page)

Jannie Burgess had always been a lady who knew her lipstick, powder, and paint. She was seventy-nine years old now and obese, but in her youthful prime she had been tall with an hourglass figure and unlimited access to the beauty parlor owned by her older sister Gladys. She had fled an abusive husband as a young mother and
lost her only son in Vietnam, but she knew joy, too, loved putting on the perfume and grabbing her daughter, Linette. “Let’s dance, let’s dance!”

The woman drifting in and out of consciousness had a history, and Burgess’s theatrical daughter couldn’t resist describing it to the young, dark-haired nurse who had been assigned to care for her mother that day. The nurse was worried and distracted. Her husband had come into the unit holding their toddler son. He pled with her to leave town with them for safety, but the nurse stayed on duty.

Linette Burgess Guidi took to regaling her with stories. Was she aware that Jannie Burgess was a licensed practical nurse who had worked thirty-five years in New Orleans’s hospitals and nursing homes? “Oh, really?” the nurse replied. “I didn’t know that.”

Burgess had taken up nursing to support her children after working jobs as various as taxi dispatcher and secretary to a mortician. But practicing nursing in mid-twentieth-century New Orleans had presented an unsettling paradox for a woman like Burgess with light-brown skin; she could care for patients at many of the private hospitals, but
could not receive care at them. Though Jannie Burgess was born just a few months after Memorial opened in 1926 as Southern Baptist Hospital, it would be more than four decades before she could be a patient there.

In fact, Baptist was one of the last Southern hospitals to submit to integration. Medicare and other federal hospital programs were introduced in the mid-1960s, and hospitals were ineligible for reimbursements if they discriminated against or racially segregated patients. Baptist refused
to join the programs. “It is our conviction,” a 1966 hospital statement said, “that we can serve all of the people better if we remain free of governmental entanglements that would dictate the terms and conditions under which this hospital shall be operated.”

New Orleanians sent supportive letters to the hospital’s administrator. “It’s heartening to realize that there are still some who do not succumb to the dictates of socialism,” one person wrote. “Congratulations,” wrote another, “on retaining the integrity of the hospital in the face of the ever growing pressure of the Federal government to take away the rights of the business and professional men of this nation.”

The hospital began quietly accepting African American patients in 1968, in line with newly adopted nondiscrimination statements made by the Southern Baptist Convention. The denomination’s history was entwined with segregation, but its actions were now changing under pressure. The following year, in November,
the hospital set aside its opposition to Medicare and began participating in the health insurance program for seniors, “to ease the financial burden for these elderly patients,” its administrator explained in a hospital newsletter. In 1969, the federal government declared Southern Baptist Hospital in compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The decision to accept Medicare was good for business. The number of patients over sixty-five years old at Southern Baptist nearly tripled over the first two weeks.

Tensions persisted. A decade later, between the years 1979 and 1980, at least six employees filed charges of race discrimination against the hospital with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency responsible for enforcing key parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (in at least two of the cases, the agency found no cause to believe the allegations were true). One of the six employees, African American engineer Issac E. Frezel,
sued Southern Baptist Hospitals, Inc., in federal district court. He alleged that it had violated his rights under the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1866 by engaging in illegal racial discrimination when it placed him on probation for “unauthorized shift changes,” passed him
over for promotion, and, ultimately, fired him. In his suit, he contended that a white coworker involved in the same offense was not disciplined. The hospital’s lawyers argued that nothing illegal had occurred. The suit settled out of court for an unreported sum.

When Jannie Burgess had received poor treatment from patients as a nurse at various New Orleans hospitals, she did what she felt she had to do: gritted her teeth and smiled and kept going. She had a long career, and after retirement moved into senior housing at Flint-Goodridge Apartments, the pre–Civil Rights era site of
Flint-Goodridge Hospital, once the only private hospital in New Orleans where “Negro” patients could receive care and their doctors could pursue residency training. Burgess cared for an ailing brother at home and grew softer and rounder with age.

Surgery and chemotherapy had stalled her uterine cancer. She recovered and lived well for two years. In early August 2005, her legs wouldn’t carry her properly. She was admitted to Memorial to investigate the cause of her severe weakness. She had a bowel blockage. A surgeon opened her abdomen and found cancer in her liver. The tumor couldn’t be removed. “I don’t want to live on machines,” she said, and so her doctor gave her a Do Not Resuscitate order. She developed an infection, possibly as a result of the surgery, and her kidneys began to fail, possibly as a complication of the antibiotics used to treat the infection. To stay alive if her kidneys stopped working she’d need dialysis to clean her blood. Under no circumstances, she said, did she want that. The doctor discussed these preferences with Burgess, her sister, and a doting niece, then shifted the goal of her care from treating her medical problems to ensuring her comfort. She was scheduled to move out of intensive care and onto a regular medical floor as soon as a bed became available. Small doses of morphine had been ordered as needed to control any pain.

Burgess’s daughter, Linette, had lived overseas for more than two decades with her Italian husband. Mother and daughter talked frequently, but visits were rare and often did not go well. While Jannie Burgess had
helped integrate New Orleans hospitals, Linette had done the same for the New Orleans Playboy Club, becoming its
first black Bunny in 1973. This distinction had brought shame to the observant Catholic mother she referred to as a Holy Roller. Years of tension over various issues followed. Today’s visit was something of a reconciliation.

With the mayor demanding that New Orleanians evacuate the city, the relatives who had driven Linette Burgess Guidi to the hospital were anxious to begin their exodus west. It was time to leave. She told her mother she loved her and thanked her for all she had done to raise her and make her the woman she was. “Release, let it go,” Burgess Guidi said to her mother. She told her she’d be back to see her on Wednesday.

ALL STAFF MEMBERS assigned to work the hurricane at Memorial were to sign in by noon to pick up wristbands and room assignments. They parked their cars in multistory garages above the flood-prone streets. They emptied car trunks full of hurricane provisions onto borrowed carts and pushed them down the hospital corridors. Those with pets carried kennels and a requisite three-day supply of food to the medical records department on the ground floor, checking the animals into rooms that filled with the sounds of frenzied barking. They wrote the pets’ names on tracking forms and promised to keep them out of patient areas.

Unlike many others, Dr. Anna Maria Pou didn’t bring much with her to Memorial when she arrived early Sunday afternoon: no family members, no pets, no coolers packed with snacks and junk food. It was the surgeon’s first hurricane at the hospital, and when she arrived the activity struck her as highly disorganized. She sought the company of the experienced operating-room and recovery-room nurses and offered to help them move equipment. The main hospital, an amalgamation of the 1926 building and subsequently built wings, was separated from Memorial’s
new surgical suites by a bridge that administrators feared could collapse in the storm. Pou lugged supplies and equipment from the new building to an old set of operating theaters in the main hospital. She organized the rooms so that she and any other surgeon could operate in them during the storm if necessary.

Other doctors retreated to private offices to sleep, but Pou had decided for the moment not to do that. She was there to work. “I’ll just sleep on a little stretcher with y’all,” she said to the nurses. They carried stretchers to an empty endoscopy procedure suite to create an ad hoc bedroom. Staff members set up a table and unloaded abundant, picniclike provisions, having been told to bring food for three days, the amount of time local hospitals and their employees were expected to be self-sufficient in emergencies. They watched as Pou unpacked only a six-pack of bottled water, crackers, tuna fish, and something that flashed in her hand. “What’s that?” a nurse asked Pou. “That’s a can opener,” Pou replied. Was that all she thought she needed? The nurses howled.

Water, tuna, and crackers were all Pou had been able to scrounge up at home. She didn’t cook. Although she was beautiful, funny, and sociable by nature, at age forty-nine her life revolved around her surgical career.

She hadn’t always known she would be a doctor, but
even her elementary-school classmates had predicted that the caring girl with the good grades would follow in her father’s footsteps. Dr. Frederick Pou was a Dominican Republic–born, New Orleans–raised internist, well known in the community but often absent from the family’s large, two-story white colonial on Fontainebleau Drive. His wife, Jeanette, was the daughter of Sicilian immigrants. She gave birth to eleven children, and he worked tirelessly to provide for them.
He treated patients in a corner house in the Bywater, a working-class neighborhood on the opposite side of town. He sometimes scheduled office appointments until ten p.m. and returned home for dinner after midnight.

Frederick Pou made weekend house calls, and his wife sent Anna Maria and her siblings along with him on alternating weekends so they
could spend more time with him. In this way, Pou learned early what a doctor’s job was.

The children helped raise one another. Anna was the seventh, and her older siblings doted on her when she was little. One liked to dress her up in doll clothing and lead her across their lawn and the broad, tree-shaded street to show her off at St. Rita Catholic School. Later, as a grade-school student there, Pou listened closely to the nuns who taught her. They talked about purgatory and the importance of being good. A nun held up a picture of a snowman. That was the soul, pure and white. She drew an ugly black mark on it. That was what sin did.

Pou went to a Catholic all-girls high school, Mercy Academy, where the mascot was a high-stepping poodle. Pou and her siblings were popular, attractive kids, petite in stature like their father, the smallest in his family. Most of the siblings strongly resembled one another with brown hair, prominent eyelids, and full brows that contrasted with peach-hued skin. Anna had the wide, dimpled smile of a prom queen. She frequented the Valencia Social Club, mingling with other local teens who stopped by after school for a snack at the diner and partied to the beat of live bands in the evenings.

As Pou grew older, it became her turn to help mother the younger ones, driving them to after-school activities and helping prepare meals. Taking care of others was a family value, taught and modeled by her parents, a way of doing good. When friends of Pou’s younger brothers came over to play, she treated them sweetly. Some of the boys developed crushes on her.

At Louisiana State University, Pou had started out pre-med, but then changed her major against her father’s advice. Instead of a doctor she became a medical technologist in a hospital laboratory, running tests for infections. This switch in her professional direction disappointed her father. He told her she wouldn’t be satisfied.

One warm day in the late 1970s, Pou attended a party that spilled across the grounds of a restored plantation house a half hour’s drive
across Lake Pontchartrain from the city. The attendees were college-age kids and twentysomethings—the “uptown group” as they referred to themselves—private-school and Catholic-school graduates who had been raised, like Pou, in the graceful homes on the city’s western curve along the Mississippi.

The cool waters of a long swimming pool beckoned. One young man challenged another. Who could swim the farthest without coming up for air? They took sips of their gin and dove in.

The two thrashed out one long lap. In the middle of the return lap, the challenger surfaced. His competitor trounced him, swimming to the end of the lane, then rubbing it in by floating in place without lifting his head.

A friend jumped in and playfully shoved the macho victor underwater. He stayed down. It took a while before everyone realized he was no longer holding his breath. He wasn’t playing a game. He was unconscious, drowning in the shallow water.

Someone hauled him out of the pool. His skin looked grayish. There was no doctor at the party. They were all just kids, most of them drunk and some of them stoned. There was a veterinary student, but it was someone else who reacted.