Nonfiction Book Review: 'Five Days at Memorial' Recounts a Harrowing Hurricane Katrina Tale

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

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Three and a half stars, really: four stars for the first part, and three stars for the second part. The first part is well-written, but upsetting and hard to read because of the facts in this case. It involves a lot of human misery. Memorial Medical Center, originally founded as Southern Baptist Hospital in New Orleans and conceived of as a charity hospital, was ordered not to evacuate when Hurricane Katrina threatened in late August 2005. It was assumed that the hospital had plenty of food, water, and medicine and that, with its back-up generators, the hospital would not only be able to keep operating during the hurricane, but could also serve as a storm shelter.

Memorial Medical Center, post-Katrina

Many employees and family members of patients took shelter there, bringing their relatives and pets for safety. As per usual in NOLA, they expected the hurricane to be an almost tail gate party-like atmosphere. No one really expected the devastation of Katrina; windows in the hospital burst, water poured in and it was surrounded by floodwaters, accessible only by helicopter and boat. People heard gunshots outside the hospital, feared looting, and mistakenly believed that martial law had been declared.

Worst of all was the fact that the disaster plan for the hospital, drilled only a few weeks earlier, proved to be of no use whatsoever. No one appeared to be in charge; the corporation that owned the hospital, states away from the disaster, was ineffectual; the government was giving no clear instructions; hospital administrators who were on-site didn't seem to have a cohesive plan. As a result, when it became clear that the hospital would have to evacuate after all, there was no clear plan of what order patients, employees and family members should leave in. At some point, it was decided that the ambulatory patients would be evacuated before the sickest patients.

The evacuation took the five days of the title. By the fifth day, the generators had failed. Machines stopped working, the toilets had long stopped flushing (leading to horrendously unsanitary conditions), and the heat was unbearable. Because the sickest patients had not been evacuated first, nine mostly elderly, ill people lay in hospital beds on the seventh floor, many of them with high fevers. Their overworked, stressed-out caretakers feared they would have permanent brain damage because they were having breathing problems and because of their extremely high body temperatures. Someone decided they people could not be rescued, and ten people were given a combination of drugs, including morphine, that led to their deaths.

The tenth person, Emmett Everett, was only 61 years old. Although he was quadriplegic and had a very large body size, he was very much conscious and in no immediate danger of dying from the conditions inside the hospital. Although it would have been difficult to move Mr. Everett out the window, through the tunnel that led to the garage, and up onto the roof where he could be rescued by helicopter, it was possible, but for some reason no one tried. His story is among the most haunting of this book.

View from the parking garage roof of Memorial - then Southern Baptist - in 1991

The second part of the book deals with the legal proceedings that followed the evacuation of the hospital. No one was ever tried or convicted of anything from this incident, although there were both local and federal investigations, including the convening of a grand jury. The writing style in the second part isn't very compelling in parts, and it could stand to be more logically organized. (Keep in mind I read an advance reader's copy, so the final version may differ.)

I'll give an example: the very last section of the last chapter starts with the words, "'Does anyone feel that they're making a mistake?' a man on the special grand jury had asked his fellow jurors before they took their final vote." Since the previous section was about things that happened after a press conference Dr. Anna Pou held after charges against her were dismissed, mention of the grand jury is clearly out of chronological order. Unless there was a second grand jury? If that's the case, this is a lousy way to end the book, just leaving the reader hanging.

I hope a lot of hospital administrators will read this book and take this away from it: have a good evacuation plan and an emergency plan in place in case the evacuation takes much longer than expected. Make sure your generators can run for a week or more, and prepare your employees to keep giving care even in less-than-ideal conditions in case rescue is delayed.



Clearly, people died in Memorial Medical Center who didn't need to die. Some of them were very sick, but still, the were deprived of dying with dignity and their relatives and personal wishes were left out of the decision. Hurricane Katrina was a catastrophe, no doubt, but in this hospital, some of the misery was entirely preventable. People have to be willing to learn from a terrible situation - like in the 1940s when the terrible Cocoanut Grove fire led to better fire codes, better treatment for burn victims, and more widespread use of antibiotics. Hopefully, this book will help make hospitals safer in natural disasters.

In this clip, you can hear Sheri Fink talk a little bit about it in her own words.

Disclosure: I received this book for free through the Amazon Vine program. This represents my honest opinion. I did not receive any compensation other than the free Advance Readers Edition of the book, in paperback.

View all my reviews

Amazon Vine Update + A Wonderful Vampire Dream

A Wonderful Vampire Dream 

I had the most wonderful dream last night. I was a carefree college student, and I was on a trip to a small city I didn't know very well, looking for a hotel to stay in. As I drove down the city's main street looking for a decent hotel, I saw a small pool of water (a large puddle or a small pond) and two men standing - leaning against a wall and a tree - a short distance away. I was vaguely afraid of them. When I looked down in the pool of water, I saw the reflection of a woman in the second-floor window of a house across an alley from the pool. I inferred that this woman was the lover of one of the two men, and this made me vaguely jealous. 

I chose a motel. Once inside my room, I don't think I was able to lock the door, or at least lock it to my satisfaction. The two men were outside my room and I manually held the white wooden double door shut to keep them out. They wanted me to let them in. Eventually, I felt compelled to let them in. I realized at least one of them was a vampire. He looked looked like Robert Pattinson (but not as Edward Cullen - there was no sparkling). 

Photo by Eva Rinaldi, 2012. Creative Commons license.

That part sounds vaguely menacing and not very wonderful, but the next part was what I really enjoyed. The vampire sat on the bed with me, and I noticed how beautiful his hands were. I told him so. After that, I wasn't afraid of the two strangers anymore.

I went into an adjoining room, where some other college students I knew were playing a card game at a big table. I sat in on the card game, and the two men also joined us. With all the conversation going on, we all got to know each other better. That was when the vampire told me he thought I, Erin, would be much happier as an immortal. I became very excited that he was going to change me.

I don't remember all of the details of what happened next, except that the vampire, his friend, and I were joyriding in the back of a convertible that someone else was driving. Whatever else we did, it was something frivolous and essentially innocent fun, and I loved the worry-free feeling of it all, as well as being excited that I was going to become a vampire. When I woke up, I just wanted to go back into the dream reality. 

I may have been thinking about Twilight a little bit before bed, thanks to seeing this on Pinterest. 

See? It's like the Twilight cover, only with Finnick Odair sugarcubes. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire was a hot thing in social media yesterday because the second official trailer is out now. But we still have to wait until November 22 to see the movie. 

Amazon Vine Update

Last Thursday was Amazon Vine Day 1 for the month of July 2013, and both of the free items I chose were books. They came in the mail yesterday. 

One was the latest Dead Is novel (paranormal, young adult mystery) by Marlene Perez, called Dead Is Just a Dream. Like the classic Nightmare on Elm Street horror films, it's about teenagers who die in their sleep. 

Its official release date is September 3, but you can preorder now. 

The second book is Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink. This is a nonfiction book (Fink is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist as well as a physician) about Memorial Medical Center, a New Orleans hospital inside the flooded zone during Hurricane Katrina. 

Again, the book is not available until September (the 10th), but you can preorder now. 

I'm 109 pages in, and it's so sad. I just read a passage in which a doctor has told a nurse that the hospital is out of oxygen tanks and she had to let an elderly patient die, but that information was wrong--the hospital did, in fact, still have oxygen. That devastating experience the nurse had of having the old man die in her arms could have been avoided. 

This is the problem with nonfiction - reality is heartbreaking. Now do you see why I want to live in a dream? 

https://amzn.to/4cBthfu