Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (74 page)

FATHER JOHN MARSE, as hospital chaplain, was careful to tell people that he was not present when the alleged acts occurred. And he was not a bioethicist. What he would say was that people faced with bad choices should make choices that are in the best interests of patients and family members, not their own egos. He believed in comfort and felt that the staff at Memorial did the best they could to offer that. He believed that God was merciful and forgiving.

DR. BRYANT KING had stayed far away from New Orleans, turning down later CNN interview requests out of concerns for his safety. A friend warned him that the moneyed people who were trying to discredit him could sweep him under the rug and get rid of him. “Don’t say a word,” the friend said. “Go somewhere. If you’ve got shade, go in it.” Keep it low. You don’t want anyone hunting you down.

King had worked closely with Anna Pou throughout the disaster, switching off caring for patients on the second floor. He’d thought she was doing a yeoman’s job. What troubled him later was how easily someone with whom he’d had a cordial relationship could be turned to do something so horrible. No matter how tired a doctor was, the initial reaction to the proposal should have been to take a step back and say, “Are you kidding me? Oh no, that just doesn’t sound right.” He wondered what words someone could possibly have used to make Pou and others say instead, in essence, “We know this is not how we usually function, but today we’re going to do it and pretend it never happened.” He could not wrap his mind around it. And he could not believe that Pou was allowed to continue practicing medicine.

DR. HORACE BALTZ shook his head when he heard Pou’s remarks from the press conference. He was still violently upset over the euthanasia, considered it totally unethical and unnecessary. It haunted him. Pou’s alleged actions, he felt, destroyed the trust in the medical profession that is a foundation of society. That trust was further eroded by the lockstep defense of the medical community.

Pou had genuflected to thank God that she wasn’t going to prison? He longed to hear that she had taken to her knees to do something different: beg forgiveness for having violated the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.”

Just after Katrina, Britain’s
Mail on Sunday
tabloid newspaper had reported that a doctor had done exactly this. The doctor had been quoted anonymously. She was, in fact, a more repentant-sounding Anna Pou:

I did not know if I was doing the right thing. But I did not have time. I had to make snap decisions, under the most appalling circumstances, and I did what I thought was right. I injected morphine into those patients who were dying and in agony. If the first dose was not enough, I gave a double dose. And at night I prayed to God to have mercy on my soul.

“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 in July 2007. None of them said they did.
The Memorial nurses had been very sad and cried throughout their testimony. The coroner struck one juror as a “cute old man” who spoke calmly and whose opinion in large part contradicted those of his experts.

What that juror couldn’t understand was where the LifeCare staff members had been on Thursday, September 1, 2005, when the patients were medicated. It was only at the final meeting of the grand jury that two LifeCare leaders—assistant administrator Diane Robichaux and nurse executive Therese Mendez—were called to testify. The prosecutor did not ask the women very detailed questions. Mendez described how Pou came upstairs to LifeCare and said that she was assuming responsibility for the patients and that they would be given a lethal dose of drugs. Neither Mendez nor Robichaux, however, had seen what happened next, because they had gone to clear staff off the floor.

There was, of course, a witness, who had stood at the bedsides of the patients as Pou and the nurses injected them. Kristy Johnson. Two people close to Johnson would later recall that she was scheduled to appear before the special grand jury the same day as her colleagues—perhaps later in the day, because of a work schedule conflict. She was not, however, called by the prosecutors when she was available.

What sank the case in the one juror’s mind was that nobody stood before the jury and testified to seeing Anna Pou actually inject a patient. The fundamental evidence needed to pin the deaths on the woman whose name was on the indictment papers was, in this juror’s opinion, lacking.

The juror was a devotee of forensic pathologist Michael Baden’s documentary
television series
Autopsy
. What particularly struck her was the fact that so many patients who had been alive in the morning were dead by the afternoon. And Emmett Everett, he would stay with her. She would recall, years later, the vision of him eating his breakfast that Thursday morning and asking the staff when they were going to rock and roll. She believed the experts’ reports that concluded that the deaths at Memorial were homicides.

The juror was convinced—and, she believed, all of her fellow jurors were too—that a crime had occurred on that fifth day at Memorial.

EPILOGUE

HOURS BEFORE HURRICANE ISAAC’S expected arrival in New Orleans on August 29, 2012, I opened a wooden door inset with a stained-glass window and entered a small chapel. There, almost exactly seven years earlier, the bodies of men and women had been blessed after they died in the hot, darkened, powerless hospital surrounded by floodwaters.

Walking the quiet corridors of what was now known as Ochsner Baptist, I looked for someone to ask about preparations for the current storm. The sound of voices led me to a patient room. The door was open, the light was on, and balled-up sheets were strewn on the bed. A partially eaten meal tray sat on a rolling cart beside an IV pump on a tall metal pole, but the room was empty; the talk I’d heard droned only from the television.

Across the long-repaired walkway where nurse manager Karen Wynn had run in flip-flops to answer a Code Blue, and Dr. Anna Pou had girded herself with a call to her family before flying across its swaying, windowed expanse, was the surgery building, the site of the current ICU. Nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo again cared for patients here; their faces smiled from pictures on the bulletin board in the staff room.

The ICU was a hive of light and monitors, but it was filled with only
ghosts. Every few seconds a dissonant croak issued from a disconnected machine. The building creaked in a gust of wind from a band of the approaching hurricane. The patient bays were vacant, the nurses gone, the hospital evacuated before the storm. Electrical transfer switches still sat in the basement, but
one lesson from Katrina had been learned.

HAD IT ONLY been learned in New Orleans?
Two months later, on the night of Monday, October 29, I watched a health executive burst into a meeting of doctors at the command center for Long Island’s North Shore-LIJ Health System. Ceiling tiles rattled in the wind and television screens showed images of Superstorm Sandy raging over New York City.

“NYU called,” the executive said. “They want to evacuate. I don’t know how to help them right now. They’re in a panic mode.” Officials at New York University’s Langone Medical Center were asking for ambulances in the midst of the storm to pick up four critically ill babies from the neonatal intensive care unit.

Like Mayor Ray Nagin in New Orleans before Katrina, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg had exempted hospitals in low-lying “Zone A” areas of the city from his pre-storm evacuation order. He made this decision even though city and state health officials knew that many of them had backup generator systems that could fail if towering, wind-swept tides slammed into the coastline. After everything that should have been learned about those horrific days in New Orleans, another hospital in a major American city now found itself without power, its staff fighting to keep alive their most desperately sick patients.

The North Shore-LIJ executive had his own hospitals to worry about—sixteen of them spread across New York and Long Island. Minutes later, a member of his team delivered an alarming report about one of them, a community hospital in Bay Shore, New York.

“Water is still rising at Southside,” a corporate safety officer said. “We have a good hour before high tide.” Hours earlier, corporate leaders had called Southside and Staten Island University Hospitals to go over what they would do if backup systems failed and part or all of their facilities suddenly lost power.

Officials huddled around a speakerphone. “There’s a good possibility it will occur,” warned a Staten Island University Hospital official. Part of the power system, he said, was below ground. “It cannot be used if it floods.”

Doctors took to a whiteboard to sketch out priorities: “Establish clinical command structure”; “triage.”

As a reporter who had come to see how hurricane medical response had evolved since Katrina, I sat watching them, dismayed. This nonprofit parent company had a highly organized, local command center and was offering proactive and robust assistance not only to its own hospitals but also others in the region. This much was different from the support that Tenet and LifeCare headquarters provided to their hospitals at the time of Katrina.