Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink Page B

Hospitalmerged with a New Orleans Catholic hospital, Mercy, in the early 1990s and then both
     were sold to giant, for-profit Tenet Healthcare Corporation in 1995. Mercy-Baptist’s
     president didn’t hide his lack of enthusiasm for the sale when he announced it in
     prophetic terms: “Due to market-driven health-care reform, the days of stand-alone
     community hospitals are limited.”
    Christmas decorating contests and the decades-old motto “Healing Humanity’s Hurt”
     disappeared. Gone, on paper, was the Baptist name; calling it that became a satisfying,
     if minor, form of rebellion. Now press releases extolled Memorial Medical Center’s
     “fiscally sound partnerships,” and “stronger financial performance.” Patient-care
     managers were given monthly budgets and productivity goals and took a beating if they
     failed to meet them. Success was rewarded with progressively tighter budgets. Mulderick
     adapted and survived.
    Tall and fair-skinned, with straight red hair cut short in a pageboy, she had a tough,
     no-nonsense manner that intimidated some employees. She was known as calm and cool,
     even cold, under pressure.
    After the maintenance crew came running to announce the breaking windows, Mulderick
     got on the phone with Cheri Landry. The senior intensive care nurse was camping in
     the new surgery building across Magnolia Street where Pou and her group were. Mulderick
     told Landry to get everyone out of there before the bridge linking the two buildings
     collapsed or its windows shattered. The staff members and their families would have
     to make a terrifying dash across its swaying, rattling expanse.
    Anna Pou called one of her sisters before making the trip. “The walkway’s about to
     collapse. I have to run across it,” she said. “Just checking to make sure you all
     got out.” She learned that one sister, a dialysis nurse, had not left the city, staying
     instead in the flood-prone Lakeview neighborhood near Lake Pontchartrain. Pou knew
     she was tough, but she prayed for her anyway.
    Mulderick went with the maintenance men to survey the hospital. They roped off the
     danger zones and moved patients out of exposed areas into interior hallways. In the
     ICU on the top floor, where Jannie Burgess and around twenty other patients were staying,
     the small patient rooms were arrayed along the building’s outer walls. Most patients
     were attached to oxygen tubing, IV pumps, and EKG monitors plugged into outlets and
     would be difficult to move away from windows. Instead, for the first time anyone could
     remember, maintenance crews had boarded up the windows with plywood from the inside.
    The exposed sides of the windows shattered under a hail of rocks launched from nearby
     rooftops. The ICU filled with screams. Plywood grew wet and buckled. Water slipped
     inside to pool on the floors, creating another hazard. The father of one of the nurses
     on duty, who had taken shelter in the hospital with her, tried to stop his daughter
     from entering the area to do her work. The metal window frames strainedand creaked like the
Titanic
,it seemed to one doctor, who finished up his work and headed to a lower floor. Several
     policemen were camping at the hospital, and a patient’s son brought one upstairs to
     insist his mother be moved into the corridor for safety. “If I had someplace else
     to move her, I would,” the nurse manager of the ICU, Karen Wynn, said, exasperated.
     “This is a clinical decision. This is not a decision he can make. We have to keep
     the patient safe, but also do what’s clinically appropriate.” The policeman understood,
     but the son didn’t. His rage threatened to ripple chaos into the calamity. “If you’re
     going to continue to be a problem, we will have you removed by the same cops you got,”
     Wynn told him. There was enough going on without this.
    At 4:55 a.m., the supply of city power to the hospital failed. Televisions in patient
     rooms flicked off.