Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink Page A

were among those awaiting the
     answer.

4:30 A.M., FOURTH FLOOR ,
MEMORIAL MEDICAL CENTER
    A LOUD CRACK startled Susan Mulderick awake, and she jumped up and ducked away from
     the floor-to-ceiling windows. She and her family members scrambled to gather their
     belongings and ran out of her office into the corridor. Mulderick’s seventy-six-year-old
     mother, a gray-haired widow in a billowy housedress, had never moved so quickly.
    Mulderick slammed her office door shut behind them to protect passersby from flying
     glass in case the windows shattered completely. The sturdy building shook violently.
     The sounds of the wind stealing through invisible crevices added to the aura of terror,
     a moaning, like a ghost, up and down the musical scale.
    In the corridor, a panicked crew from plant operations ran toward Mulderick. “Glass
     is shattering all over the building!” they yelled. She was in charge. What did she
     want them to do?
    It had fallen to Mulderick, the rotating hospital manager on call, to lead the hurricane
     response at Memorial as “incident commander.” She felt responsible for every patient,
     staff member, and visitor. Her job was to oversee all emergency operations, lead meetings,
     and make decisions with the hospital’s top executives. The fifty-four-year-old nursing
     director appeared well qualified for this job, with the authority of her thirty-two
     years of employment at the hospital—decades more than CEO L. René Goux, also present,
     who had been sent by Tenet to run Memorial only in 2003. Mulderick directed sixteen
     nursing departments and had more than fifteen years of experience on the hospital
     emergency committee, which she now led. When Hurricane Ivan had menaced and missed
     New Orleans a year earlier, she had also been at the helm, although Memorial’s emergency
     management plan called for the CEO, typically, to assume the role of incident commander.
    Mulderick had another sort of crisis-management experience—the family kind. Like Pou,
     she belonged to a large, Catholic school–raised New Orleans brood. But as she grew
     up, despite the outings to City Park in perfect, matching Easter dresses and bonnets,
     beyond the swingset and white shingles, beneath the high ceilings and crystal chandeliers,
     a certain chaos reigned. The third of seven children, the care of her younger siblings
     had often fallen to her, and she emerged from childhood remarkably strong and calm,
     a manager, an emergency responder.
    Mulderick began her nursing career in the ICU at Baptist in 1973 and never left. She
     raised her own children and painted as a hobby, but formore than three decades, she had given almost everything else of herself to the hospital.She rarely took a break and once, when she did, a deadly storm nearly ended her life.
     In 1982, after spending five years planning a trip to Las Vegas with friends from
     Southern Baptist and another local hospital, she and they were bumped off an overbooked
     flight at the last minute, leaving their suitcases behind on Pan Am 759. The 145 people
     on board that airplane plus eight more on the ground were lost when a violent form
     of wind shear, a microburst, blew the Boeing 727-200 back down to the ground soon
     after takeoff. Mulderick saw smoke billowing out of the trees from a window of the
     plane her group had boarded fifteen minutes later. True to her coolheaded nature,
     Mulderick did not tell her friends what she saw so as not to make them worry.
    Hospital life and family life intertwined. One of Mulderick’s brothers died at Memorial
     after back surgery. A sister, with help from Dr. Horace Baltz, had been saved there
     from a bleeding brain aneurysm. Another sister worked at the hospital as an executive
     assistant, and Mulderick’s housemate, as a nursing coordinator. Mulderick held on
     to her position as a nursing director for more than a decade, through significant
     changes. Under financial pressure, Southern Baptist