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

The author is to be congratulated for the impressive depth of her reportage; she clearly has a strong point of view as to what happened at Memorial and why, but doesn't let her opinion get in the way of the reporting - she lets the participants tell the story, and tell it from their perspective and lets the readers draw their own conclusions.

And the most charitable interpretation would seem to be that people of good intention, working in difficult conditions, with sleep deprivation, little communication with the outside world and worry about their own families, make bad decisions that seemed justifiable at the time, but looked at with the clarity of distance and hindsight clearly were not. Was this criminal? Is it even punishable ? Is show more it not the lack of planning for a predictable disaster actually the problem? Wasn't it in fact all caused by criminal negligence? But who's?

This book raises all of these difficult issues whilst taking you step by step through a series of terrible decisions - at each point you want to shake the participants and yell "no no, make the other choice".

Compelling. Terrifying. Sobering show less

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was unprepared. The entire country was unprepared and it was unnecessarily disastrous. In Five Days at Memorial, Sheri Fink looks at what happened in a single hospital during the hurricane and in the days that followed, as power failed and the people inside began to wonder if they would all survive. This is non-fiction that reads like a novel, with the days in the hospital described in chaotic detail. Things were a mess and there was a distinct lack of leadership, both within the hospital and on the part of the hospital's corporation and the American government outside of it.

In the aftermath, after everyone had left and the flood waters receded, there were found to have been too many deaths, show more especially when compared to the similarly struck Charity Hospital. There were rumors that some of the medical personnel had taken matters into their own hands, believing that certain patients were too ill to be rescued, if indeed rescue was even coming. Several patients had all died during the same time frame and all had high levels of morphine and sedatives in their bodies.

An investigation is opened, spurred along by intense media interest, and focusses on two nurses and the physician Anna Pou. Five Days at Memorial follows the investigation and the lives of those who were affected closely as lines are drawn between those who think this is a politically motivated witch hunt and those concerned that people got away with murder.

This is a gut-wrenching story. I changed my mind about what went wrong, who was to blame and what the motivations were for those medical personnel several times throughout. It was interesting to note how adeptly the corporations involved sidestepped any real accountability. The hospital CEO and a few other executive officers were present during the debacle, but stayed largely in the one wing of the hospital that retained power and air conditioning, relaxing and watching TV and eating chicken noodle soup while across the way patients died in 110 degrees heat and without respirators. The CEO failed to lead, although he did graciously bring nurses some coffee. It seemed to have occurred to no one to move the patients into the one place where their suffering could have been alleviated. And after rescue, while those same patients lay on the floor of an airport with inadequate care, those same executive officers were flown away in the corporate jet.

Meanwhile, the medical and support personnel were given no or conflicting information. There was no plan of rescue. Those patients flown out had to be carried down several flights of stairs, pushed through a maintenance shaft, driven through a car park, then carried up several flights of rickety stairs to a decaying heliport. Helicopters left without passengers when they were delivered too slowly. Seriously ill patients had to lay outside in the sun for hours waiting for the next helicopter to fly in. And there were constant rumors and fears that the hospital would be overrun at any time by gangs of looters.

Five Days at Memorial brings those days to vivid light. It was compelling and uncomfortable reading. The book has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It would be a worthy winner. show less

This is an important book. Physician and author Sheri Fink chronicles the horrific story of what happened to patients and doctors who were stranded at Memorial Medical Center after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Dr. Anna Pou and two nurses were later charged with euthanizing critically ill patients who were not expected to survive. Fink is bracingly fair throughout--you won't find any villains here, just desperate people mired in conditions that would embarrass a Third World country. The real villains, in fact, were the local, state and federal officials who failed to plan for a disaster that everyone knew was coming. Fink is also a good storyteller: even though readers who followed this well-publicized case will know how it show more turned out, the second half of the book is surprisingly suspenseful. show less

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, an investigative piece written by Sheri Fink, is a vivid portrait of tragedy that occurred in New Orleans when it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The first half of the narrative details the five days in which Memorial was battered by Hurricane Katrina and then isolated by the flood waters that destroyed much of the city. It is a gripping, day by day, often hour by hour, account Fink has created from official reports and interviews with the staff, patients and others trapped in the city hospital. Fink relates the harrowing circumstances that developed in Memorial as resources dwindled and services failed, and the thoughts, experiences and emotions of those show more fearing they may not survive. However this moving and powerful narrative leads to the real focus of Five Days at Memorial - the alleged actions of some of the medical staff trapped at the hospital, most notably Dr Anna Pou, accused of euthanising as many as a dozen patients, and possibly more, during the emergency.

The second half of the book recounts the legal aftermath of those allegations which resulted in Pou and two nurses being arrested for multiple accounts of second degree murder. It describes the investigation into the deaths by the the attorney general, the coroner and other medical and legal experts and raises issues related to the ethics of disaster management in a medical setting. This section is less emotive and therefore less gripping, but still thought provoking and very readable.

Sheri Fink was uniquely placed to write this book as a doctor with experience working in disaster and war zones, and extensive journalistic experience, including authoring "War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival" in 2003. Clearly Fink engaged in exhaustive research into the the events, and their aftermath, at Memorial, drawing on multiple resources, resulting in a detailed perspective of the tragedy. I don't think it is quite true that the account is written without bias though. It seems to me, by both her choice of language and some of the details she chose to focus on, that Fink formed a opinion about the events that took place inside Memorial, and her assessment seeped into the narrative.

I found Five Days at Memorial to be an engrossing, intriguing and poignant read. It is a story that needed to be told and I desperately hope that governments and bureaucrats worldwide have learned from the woeful lack of preparedness, planning, communication and resources exhibited during this disaster as a whole, and from the specific events that occurred at Memorial. show less

This book reads a bit like a script for a movie about an imagined catastrophe set in a dystopian future; without the well documented research which the author lays out at the end, it would be hard to imagine these events could really have happened as she describes.

Sheri Fink does a nice job laying out the facts and the timeline of the awful days at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans immediately before and after Hurricane Katrina. While she makes clear that she has formed a conclusion about what really happened, she resists the temptation to directly criticize those who disagree. She presents with clarity and empathy the situations of the doctors and nurses, patients and family members, and the judges and lawyers who had to sort through show more the aftermath. She shows less sympathy for the executives from hospital and insurance companies who hovered around the situation like inept sentries.

This book is hard to read in parts, because of the horrible human tragedies which occurred. Yet it’s a compelling account, pieced together in a Roshomon-like narrative, of the enormity of this human tragedy, describing in detail the frustrated and exhausted people involved and the terrifying decisions which were made inside Memorial Hospital during those five horrific days. show less

This was a hard book to read because I just got so enraged at the subject matter. I started this when the book came out last September, and had to read it in spurts because it was too soul-crushing to read in one go.

Full disclosure: I know the author through professional work, but even if I don't I think I still would have rated this book highly. Sheri tells a very important and compelling story, even if it is a hard one to stomach. After all her research about Memorial, she was convinced about the necessity for having emergency management plans for healthcare systems. Reading the first part of the book, I could see why. There was a complete systems breakdown - not just infrastructure (which there was), but communications, show more decision-making, and sheer common sense. So much of what happened could have been prevented with a comprehensive plan that everybody knew about and followed.

However, what utterly horrified me the most was the complete failure of the prosecutors to do their job during the trial of Dr. Pou. Sheri details how the prosecution basically lost the case because they did not utilize fully the witnesses, evidence, or arguments at their disposal. All the evidence pointed to the fact that something happened at Memorial and there were witnesses implicating Pou, but none of them were brought before the jury. I am baffled as to the level of incompetence. show less

Five Days at Memorial is the story of what happened in one hospital in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August 2005. Ms. Fink covers the hospital’s history, its performance during previous historic hurricanes, and its preparedness as well as the actual events once Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. It is a tale of human perseverance and desperation as well as a warning tale about the need for detailed preparations for catastrophes.

I loved Five Days at Memorial and hated it at the same time. Ms. Fink does an amazing job capturing the drama and the plethora of emotions occurring within Memorial during those five days. Her research is far-reaching and thorough, and she presents her findings with minimal bias. The show more events of those five days are filled with drama and ingenuity, the highest of highs and the absolute lowest of lows. Ms. Fink does an excellent job in attempting to place readers into the heart of the action complete with visceral descriptions of horrid, unsanitary conditions. The story of Memorial Hospital during and after Katrina makes for a modern-day horror story that is difficult to stop reading.

The problem is that the story of what occurred within the hospital is one that should have never happened, and that’s where the hate steps into the mix. The lack of preparation on the part of the hospital, the inability to effectively communicate, the lack of clear leadership and chain of command, and even the failure to follow normal triage practices are baffling. Post-9/11 life demands emergency plans for the most extreme situations just in case they become reality. Memorial Hospital did not have a good emergency plans. The breakdown in communication and no chain of command made things even worse by ensuring that instructions contradicted other instructions and rumors ran rampant. In situations like these, the madmen are running the mental hospital, ensuring the breakdown in logic and order. What makes the situation in Memorial worse is the fact that there were nearby hospitals who were experiencing almost the exact same conditions, but they never let chaos rule the day. These hospitals kept the focus on their patients and their patients’ needs and did what they had to do to keep them alive until all were rescued. Two hospitals, similar preparedness, same scenario but a completely different end result. It only adds fuel to the argument that what happened in Memorial was avoidable with just a bit more leadership and organization.

As for the end-of-life care/euthanasia debacle, Ms. Fink tries to remove any bias in her presentation of the facts as told to her by those who were there. She does not set out to make Dr. Pou a villain; in fact, by including a side story about one of her patients and the career path that brought her to Memorial Hospital, she attempts to present a woman who cares deeply for her patients and for her profession. However, to me, I see Dr. Pou as the worst kind of narcissist, one who believes the initials after her name give her rights over the life or death of anyone and exempts her from repercussions. She takes care of her patients so that they can idolize her, fueling her narcissism. I was not a fan of Dr. Pou when she was first introduced, and her later actions confirm my opinions.

Five Days at Memorial is the type of book you want to read with a group because you will have so many opinions and so many questions you want to discuss; to read it in isolation is a challenge. In addition, the book itself is a challenge of everything you thought you knew about the medical profession and will make you think twice about going to a hospital if ill. It makes you question your views on euthanasia and end-of-life care as well, a hotly contested topic throughout the country. However, it is a book that needs to be read so that everyone understands what can happen when there is a breakdown in order and communication and no emergency plans. It needs to be read so that you can take the steps now to protect yourself and your wishes should you become to sick to express them. It needs to be read so that what happened during those Five Days at Memorial never happens again. show less