Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

Orleans, attended private and Catholic
     schools, and now, with time to talk, they found they had friends in common. The nurses
     knew Pou’s first serious boyfriend from his work as an anesthetist at Memorial. “If
     you saw him now!” they teased her. He was a sturdy man with playful eyes, apple cheeks,
     and a lopsided smile who now had a wife, three daughters, and a graying, receding
     hairline. Pou took out her lipstick and began applying it. “What are you doing?” a
     nurse asked her. “It’s midnight! What are you doing?”
    Pou said she wanted to look her best in case she saw him. The nurses laughed and reassured
     her. He had recently left his job.
    It was hot outside, but cold in the hospital; the plant operations team had lowered
     the thermostat to make the buildings extra cool while there was still city power.
     If the hurricane knocked out utilities, air-conditioning would be lost because the
     hospital’s backup power system wasn’t designed to run it. The nurses knew from previous
     experience it would heat up quickly. Pou made a few phone calls to friends and family.
     If anything bad happened, they could find her at the hospital, she said lightly. “What
     are you doing there?” a friend in Houston asked afterwatching the ominous weather forecasts. “Get out!” But Pou wasn’t changing her mind.
     “I’m going to stay,” she said.
    As the storm approached, there were about 183 patients at Memorial—a little more than
     usual due to last-minute storm admittances—and nearly as many staff members’ pets.
     LifeCare-Baptist had an additional 55 patients, including the ones nursing director
     Gina Isbell had helped move from the St. Bernard campus. Around 600 staff members
     had arrived to provide care, along with hundreds of family members and companions.
     Memorial served a diverse clientele, a short drive to the genteel mansions of Uptown
     and a half-mile from a public housing project. Some community members had also come
     for shelter. Administrators tallied the census of humans in the medical center buildings
     at between 1,800 and 2,000.
    Lightning flashed in the dark night. Rain rippled onto the road beneath the streetlights
     and beat against the windows with the undulations of the wind.
    Pou did what came naturally and what she would do many times over the coming days.
     She prayed.
DAY TWO
MONDAY, AUGUST 29, 2005
    2:11 A.M., WWL New Orleans Radio:
    “Let’s go to Allen. Allen you’re on the sixth floor of Baptist Hospital? I bet those
     windows are doing a little shimmy shake right now, aren’t they?”
    “Yes, sir, and I’ve been on patrol since around twelve forty five. It’s been a heck
     of a show…. We’ve had about three good squalls come through in that time.”…
    “The windows are already doing the shimmy shake there on the sixthfloor? You know the winds are much higher where you’re at than they are down at ground
     level.”
    “Yeah. That’s one thing everybody in the hospital is really, really aware of. And,
     um, most of the patients who take critical care have been actually moved away from
     windows.”
    “Any idea what those windows can take?”
    “No. I’m not going to find out, either.”
    “Well, we might. We might find out.”
    The news announcers reported that three people had died on a bus on the long exodus
     from a New Orleans nursing home to a Baton Rouge church. Many of the survivors were
     dehydrated. Other details weren’t yet available.
    Katrina shed some of its fury over the Gulf and spun north before beginning to envelop
     the coast in its massive grip. Area residents called in, concerned about what would
     happen over the coming hours. Would this be merely the worst storm they’d seen, the
     announcers asked, or would it cause a true worst-case scenario, with significant flooding?
     The National Guard was estimating that more than 25,000 people who wouldn’t or couldn’t
     leave New Orleans were packed into the Superdome. They