Hospital emergency preparedness in post-9/11 America, as she points out, was skewed towards terror, not natural disasters – particularly absurd in the case of the Memorial, which had been flooded before, during a hurricane in the 1920s. Although the doctors insisted that they had been giving palliative care to the very sick, many of whom, they argued, were dying after spending five days trapped inside the hospital, key personnel, including Dr Anna Pou and two nurses, Cheri Landry and Lori Budo, would later be accused of killing those patients, though a grand jury refused to indict them.įink's story is, in too many grim aspects, a tragedy foretold. And also instances of heroism.'īy the time the crisis was over, 45 patients would die including 20 who were found with elevated levels of a cocktail of painkillers. (Sept.At the book's heart is a dark and ambiguous story: the allegation that two doctors and several nursing staff working for the hospital on the last day of the crisis, awaiting evacuation, carried out euthanasia on a number of the terminally ill patients housed in the separate unit inside Memorial.įor Fink – who won a Pulitzer as a reporter for her investigation into what occurred at Memorial – the hospital was a 'microcosm' of the larger failures that assailed New Orleans during Katrina, 'with compromised physical structure, compromised operating systems, compromised individuals.

Plenty of hard-earned lessons were learned from the stunningly mismanaged response to the disaster, yet Fink acknowledges that for the families of those who never made it out of Memorial, the “war against nature” could only be considered a loss. Yet investigators realized that unraveling the tragedies was “as impossible as collecting fragments of a fractured mirror and then, somehow, inferring what image had once appeared there.” Some members of the medical staff were charged with murder, but a grand jury acquitted them.

An alarming 45 bodies were recovered from the crippled hospital, nine of which were deemed suspected victims of euthanasia. and Ph.D., won the award for the investigative reporting on which this book is based) and breathtaking narration, she chronicles the chaotic evacuation of the hospital and the agonizing ethical, physical, and emotional quandaries facing Memorial nurses and doctors, including a nightmarish triage process that led to the controversial decision to inject critically ill patients with fatal doses of morphine in order to refocus attention on those with a chance of surviving. In this astonishing blend of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalism (Fink, who also has an M.D. “They were in a war zone,” Fink (War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival) writes of those stranded inside New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center in the calamitous wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink