Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (66 page)

Pou began to visit almost daily when she was in New Orleans. The workers at the shrine taught her again to have faith. God had sent people to help her, and she came to believe in Father Seelos’s ability to heal the body and soul. She needed “a lot of healing of soul and heart,” she’d say. There were times she was depressed, moments she found it difficult to continue, days when friends, hearing despair in her voice, suggested gently that maybe she should “talk to somebody.” Her steel magnolia mother told her God would take care of her. Pou prayed with the people at the shrine and found the strength to go on, she said, “thanks to the grace of God, the greatest healer.”

Pou spoke nearly every day with Rick Simmons. She shared her anxiety and details she could discuss with nobody else in often lengthy, tearful conversations. She followed his advice not to watch the news, and she let him handle media inquiries and a stack of interview and book proposals. He had not yet committed to any of the offers, instead advising Pou to explore options for marketing her story if she was indicted, because the legal costs would be huge.

Pou knew the local public was behind her and the two nurses because Simmons had commissioned a poll of the potential jury pool to help him decide whether to move for a change of venue. He found, as he described it, that
76 percent of Orleans Parish residents supported the health professionals and opposed an indictment. Only 8 percent wanted them to be indicted, and the rest were undecided.

That backing was reflected in the letters that arrived in a post office box for Cheri Landry and Lori Budo, full of kind words: I wasn’t there, but I’m a nurse, too; or my relative’s a nurse; or I’m a former patient or coworker or doctor, and I know you did the best you could. On the nurses’ support fund website, ICU nurse Cathy Green solicited not only money for Budo and Landry, but also “cards, letters and words of encouragement” to help cheer the nurses.

The accused women also uplifted each other. When Landry’s house had to be demolished due to flood damage, Budo went to pick a few items out of the putrid muck, taking them home, washing and sterilizing them for her friend—a couple of boxes’ worth salvaged from the belongings of a lifetime.

Far worse than losing everything she owned, Landry told Green, was losing her job. Landry questioned whether they would ever be able to be nurses again.

Not working was difficult both professionally and existentially. Tenet continued to pay the nurses’ legal fees, but in many ways, their position after the arrests was more difficult than Anna Pou’s. Unlike Pou, Landry and Budo did not have a university job to fall back on when they could not practice clinically. Landry had lost her home to Katrina and was the primary caregiver for her ailing mother. Budo was the major breadwinner in her family with two children in college. The nurses were middle class, with mortgages, rent, and car loans to pay.

Colleagues from the Memorial ICU sold plastic bracelets and car magnets to raise money for the two nurses. They organized a committee to deliver food and perform “other acts of kindness” for them. At the request of their friends, Landry and Budo drew up itemized budgets and received a monthly allowance from the support fund to cover bills, food, and clothing. Landry
told a reporter for the local
Gambit Weekly
that she was grateful, but having her bills paid this way was very humbling and weird. “It’s like someone else’s life.” The reporter wrote that Budo wept during the joint interview.

The women’s supporters worked to keep a three-month cushion of funds in the bank. One particularly generous donor said that if the treasury ever fell short, he would pick up the slack. The medical staff of the hospital gave each of the two nurses a gift of $10,000.

Getting together with Budo or Landry reminded Green of being at a funeral. They could be talking calmly one moment, and someone would start crying the next. They asked, “Why me?” Green felt terrible knowing that her friend Lori awoke every morning thinking,
I could lose my husband and my children. I could go to jail for the rest of my life for staying at the hospital
. Green believed the nurses’ lives would never be all right again. She saw the toll their plight was taking on their families.

Anna Pou, in contrast, had kept her job and quietly returned to operating again, although her PR force did nothing to dispel the public’s perception that the arrest had stilled the hands of one of Louisiana’s great surgeons. She restricted her clinical work to the public hospital in Baton Rouge, Earl K. Long (named after Gov. Huey Long’s younger brother, who also served as governor), a limping structure with two aluminum-clad cylindrical towers some doctors referred to as the “twin trash cans.” Among other things, Rick Simmons feared the potential for “
frivolous lawsuits” lodged by private pay patients. Some attorneys in New Orleans believed that poor patients had less wherewithal to sue their doctors.

LSU had not reopened Charity Hospital in New Orleans after Katrina, lobbying instead for state and federal support to build a long-hoped-for new hospital, and Earl K. Long was picking up some of the slack. The air-conditioner in the operating room didn’t work reliably, and Pou operated sometimes under the light of hunting headlamps. Pou questioned her surgical academy’s practice of sending surgeons overseas when Louisiana was, to her mind, “as Third World as any place you want to visit.”

The state medical board had not sanctioned or investigated Pou. She even received something of a promotion, being named director of Louisiana
State University’s residency training program for her specialty, which required the approval of national medical organizations.

ON MAY 19, 2007, secretaries, nurses, and doctors who had once worked with Pou in Texas spent hours dressing up a windowless exhibit room in the basement of the Hyatt Regency in Houston, covering concrete walls with cardboard cutouts in the shape of the New Orleans symbol, the fleur-de-lis, slipping black polyester sheaths over dozens of ugly metal chairs, and placing tall candles into hurricane glasses. They had organized a disaster-preparedness seminar and dinner dance fund-raiser for Pou far from New Orleans, where a fancy celebration to raise money for her defense might seem inappropriate.

As her friends worked, Pou paid a visit to her old hairdresser, Raoul, who created a poufy shag for the occasion. Another stylist tended to her eighty-three-year-old mother, who had ridden in with her for the event along with many of her brothers and sisters. They were staying at the hotel, some sharing beds.

Before the disaster seminar, well-wishers crowded around to ask about her ongoing legal travails. Pou compared them to purgatory. “Now I know what the nuns were talking about in Catholic School,” she said, and laughed bitterly. “I know exactly what it feels like.” She recalled the little white snowmen the nuns had said represented the soul and had marked in black to symbolize sins. Pou had thought her soul was white. “Apparently not,” she said to her admirers. “I have a feeling I must have had some black marks I didn’t know about.”

She stood with a phalanx of siblings, and many attendees remarked on the diminutive women’s striking resemblance. Pou and her sisters even finished one another’s stories. When the subject of conversation drifted to the hurricane, the sisters stopped themselves lightly. “We won’t even
go back there,” Pou said. Her older sister Jeannie—the dialysis nurse whose phone conversation with Pou had cut out after the Seventeenth Street drainage canal split open and began filling her Lakeview neighborhood with Katrina’s floodwaters—picked up the riff. “We can’t, we’re not goin’ back there,” she agreed.

As they discussed disaster preparedness that afternoon, Rick Simmons argued that Katrina showed what worked best was a central, top-to-bottom command. He gave the example of the Coast Guard, perhaps not knowing that many in the Guard attributed their Katrina successes, conversely, to the initiative of ground-level crew members who were empowered to solve problems impromptu and worked with great autonomy.

“Well, there was a problem with the Coast Guard,” Pou asserted. “The Coast Guard do not fly at night. When you have a disaster, you need people who can fly at night. That’s absurd that that can’t happen, in my opinion.”

Of course the contention wasn’t true. In the days after Katrina, Coast Guard air crews had donned night-vision equipment and risked tangling themselves in power lines to land on rooftops, hack into attics, and rescue people, including patients at Memorial. The Coast Guard had specific policies and procedures for
flying at night.

Pou could fix on an idea and be absolutely convinced of it, and convince others of it, even without all the evidence. “Trust me, they don’t fly at night,” she said to the audience. “Ask Vince.” Her husband, a pharmacist who was a recreational pilot, had heard this.

What “really rescued people in Katrina” was “the military,” she said, as if discounting the Coast Guard as part of the military. “It was the Night Hawks,” she said, meaning Black Hawks, “those big, giant Black Hawk military helicopters that came in and got everybody.”

“It was dangerous to fly at night because there were so many unlit towers,” Vince Panepinto said. He had become a legend among Pou’s friends for having reportedly made his way north to Hammond, Louisiana,
after Katrina’s floodwaters rose, and from there flown helicopters to rescue people.

One of the seminar presenters, Dr. Neil Ward, gently cited a report suggesting the Coast Guard had in fact flown at night. “They make the point that they did, with night-vision goggles, make some rescues.”

Pou expressed similarly unshaded, Manichaean views on other matters. The LSU Medical Center employees working with her to serve the poor at the rundown public hospital in Baton Rouge were heroic. “I tell you, the courage. They are so courageous,” she said. “I’ve never seen such altruism.”

By contrast, those at the rival medical school, Tulane, had “abandoned all indigent care” for the uninsured poor, she said, even as a system of clinics set up by Tulane doctors in New Orleans after Katrina was continuing to treat thousands of residents for free.

Pou had told many friends she would never return to practicing in New Orleans after what had happened to her, but at the seminar she said she hoped other doctors would stay there, despite conditions she compared to “Civil War Reconstruction,” to help bring back the city.

“We just have to give people a shot of hope,” she said without irony.

Before the seminar ended,
Pou’s former chairman from Galveston complimented her. “There’s never been a stronger patient advocate in our department than Anna Pou,” he said. He lauded the work she was doing now at Louisiana State University to reorganize its residency program. “All of us are praying for you,” he said.

Pou thanked her friends at the seminar for helping her through her ordeal. “I know that phenomenal good is going to come of this. I’ve been through some very dark places in my mind. I wouldn’t be here without all of you. The courage and strength all of you have given me are a gift from God.”

A FEW HOURS later in the transformed hotel basement ballroom, a former colleague of Pou’s welcomed around two hundred guests who had donated up to $2,000 per couple to attend and support her. “Doing the right thing sometimes isn’t the most popular thing to do,” he said into a microphone. “But it certainly is not a crime. And so I think all of us are here today to celebrate doing the right thing. So that’s what I want the emphasis of this evening to be, is to be a celebration.”

Pou took the microphone in tears. “If it would not be for you,” she told her supporters, “I would not be standing here today.” She thanked them from the bottom of her heart and told them their love and support got her out of bed every day. “I consider myself one of the luckiest people that I’ve known because people have been so wonderful.”

The organizers kicked off the entertainment with a country ditty about Pou, sung raspy and gravelly to an untuned guitar, written and recorded by a patient whose voice box Pou had reconstructed. Waiters served steak and poured wine. A local band, the DarDans, played Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Born on the Bayou” and invited the “bayou folks” to dance. Pou and around a dozen others obliged, drinking and dominating the dance floor throughout the night.