Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (34 page)

Baltz accepted the offer even though he had not asked to leave. His longtime colleagues Dr. Ewing Cook and Susan Mulderick both hugged
him and told him tearfully that they loved him. Their uncharacteristic emotion surprised the elder doctor. This wasn’t a normal good-bye.

Two men in camouflage caps who appeared to be National Guard soldiers helped Baltz step down into the unstable boat. Baltz, in shorts with white socks, held one young man’s rifle for him while the man helped others aboard. Baltz looked back at his beloved hospital. He was sure he was watching it die.

ANGELA McMANUS couldn’t believe that three men who looked like police, holding sawed-off shotguns, could be demanding that she leave her mother’s bedside near the nursing station on the LifeCare floor. They told her they were evacuating the hospital and she had to go.

“You’re going to stand over my mom’s bed with a gun pointed at me? Have you lost your mind? Shoot me!”

After staff had said her mother was being evacuated on Wednesday, McManus had waited in the boat line and had spent the night downstairs. This morning she had run into her mother’s nursing aide, whom she’d befriended.

“Angela, Mama’s doing good,” the aide said. “She’s a
strong
woman.”

“What do you mean?” McManus asked. “She’s still here?”

She climbed back up to the seventh floor and found her mother in the hallway near the nursing station where her bed had been rolled after Angela left her. Her mother was being given a cooling alcohol rubdown. “What’s going on here?” Angela McManus asked. “Why’s she so lethargic?” Angela was told patients had been given Ativan. “She can’t take Ativan!” she said, even while noticing that this time the drug seemed to have achieved its intended effect of calming rather than exciting Wilda.

Wilda was a little too calm for Angela’s liking. She kept dozing off, and Angela repeatedly woke her to make sure she was OK.

Now, as the policemen told Angela she had to go, she refused.

“I’m not leaving my mom,” she said. “I’m not leaving until they get her out of here.”

“Oh no, you’re leaving,” one of the policemen said. He lowered his gun, which had been pointed up at the ceiling, and Angela screamed. She noticed her mama didn’t awaken. Something seemed very wrong. Was it the Ativan?

“I need to talk to my mom,” Angela told the police. “Y’all move so she can’t see you.” The men moved behind the head of Wilda’s bed.

Angela roused her mother. “Mom,” she said, “the police are making me leave the hospital. They’re evacuating.”

Wilda McManus asked what was happening.

“They want us to get out of the hospital,” Angela said. “I can’t go with you.”

Angela tried to soothe her mother with words she used frequently. “It’s OK for you to go and be with Jesus. Daddy’s waiting for you, Grandma and Grandpa, Auntie Elois, waiting for you.” She had a sense that she was not only leaving her mother, her mother was about to leave her.

Wilda McManus couldn’t sit up, but she raised herself a little, looked intently at Angela, and screamed.

Angela kept calming her. “Mama, do you understand what I just told you?”

“I’m going home.”

“Yes, you’re going home.”

Wilda McManus asked her daughter to sing. Angela sang again like she always did, like it was church. She sang the gospel song “Near the Cross,” about the soul finding rest, and Wilda shut her eyes.

Angela asked her mother’s nursing aide to make sure her mother continued to receive nutrition through her feeding tube. “I’m going to be with her,” the nursing assistant said, “no matter what happens.”

Angela cried so hard during the walk downstairs that she had trouble seeing. In the heat, carrying her belongings, she quickly grew winded.
LifeCare physical medicine director Kristy Johnson, who had come up to get her, guided her down the dim staircase with a flashlight and helped carry her bags. They walked slowly, taking rests between floors. When they reached the first floor, Johnson bulldozed Angela through the crowds to the front of the boat line. Because Angela was traveling alone, a spot on a boat was quickly found for her.

KATHRYN NELSON also didn’t want to leave her mother. LifeCare nurse executive Therese Mendez was trying to convince her to go now or she’d never get out of the hospital. Nelson had inscribed Mendez in the “Especially Nice to Mother” list she had maintained throughout her mother’s hospital stay. Mendez was listed twice, meaning the smart, take-charge executive had been especially nice to Mother on at least two occasions. When Nelson told Mendez she didn’t care about missing the boats, Mendez responded so sharply Nelson felt that she had undergone a Jekyll-and-Hyde switch. “
Your mother is dying!” Mendez said, after days without sleep, having worked overnight on what she called “First Floor Beirut.” She was worried it was Nelson’s last chance to leave.

“I’m dying too!” Nelson said, and told Mendez she had cancer. She didn’t, and later she would wonder how she had come up with something so ridiculous. She would say or do anything to protect her mother.

If her mother really was dying, then why would Nelson want to leave her now after she had been with her every day in the hospital for more than a month and a half? When she had first been told to leave, on Tuesday, she had asked if she could be admitted as a patient so they could travel together. Nelson looked the part of a patient. She had taken to wearing hospital gowns during her mother’s stay.

The last time she had been made to go downstairs, she hadn’t stayed away long. She couldn’t bear to be separated from her mother. Though she had been told on Wednesday her mother would soon be evacuated,
she’d had a sense that her mother and the other bed-bound LifeCare patients would be staying for a while. She had peered at the helipad through a window and watched people, including a male nurse she recognized, boarding helicopters. The able-bodied were leaving, not the sick.

Nelson had gathered her ample belongings, bundled in a sheet like a cartoon hobo’s, and dragged them back up the stairwell Wednesday evening, but she ran into blockades: first a LifeCare nurse and then three men who seemed to be guards or police. The guards told her she couldn’t go back upstairs. They called her a “security risk.”

The security risk, all five-feet-four and 108 pounds of her, had stood her ground, arguing with the guards until a woman arrived who had just received word that her own children, not in the hospital with her, had survived the disaster. Whoever she was, she took pity on Kathryn and, with authority, told her to go ahead upstairs and spend as much time as she wanted with her mother.

Nelson found her mother in a new room—she’d been moved closer to the nursing station after the doctor’s visit—with a nurse at her bedside fanning her. A makeshift suction device, a plastic tube attached to a syringe, was being used to remove secretions from her airways. Her eyes were glazed and she was breathing with what seemed like great effort.

Kathryn requested medication to help her mother breathe more easily. The nurse agreed, saying she thought Nelson’s mother needed a bit of comfort. Her temperature, 106 degrees, was extremely high, and her chest was congested.
The nurse administered a small dose of morphine and Ativan according to the orders the infectious diseases doctor had left earlier Wednesday night in case any patients needed them. Afterward, the nurse told Kathryn Nelson that the drugs sometimes made patients like her mother stop breathing altogether. This so upset and alarmed Kathryn that she kept vigil at her mother’s side all night, not sleeping.

Overnight, Elaine Nelson’s high fever broke. In the morning her body felt cooler to the touch, her color was better, and her eyes were
open but no longer glazed. The nurse did not hear congestion in her lungs. Kathryn still had a hangover of worry, but the roar of helicopters landing one after the other on the helipad cheered her. The intensity of the rescue made her feel proud of whoever had come to save them.

Therese Mendez returned with reinforcements, some sort of security guard or policeman who might or might not have been armed. Kathryn was given a few minutes to bid her mother good-bye.

Kathryn had been trained as a registered nurse and knew from working in the ICU that even patients in comas could hear and remember what was said to them. She told her mother she was the best mom any girl could have and she was proud to be her daughter. At around eleven fifteen a.m. she kissed her mother good-bye, said a prayer over her, and, with the nurse executive, departed LifeCare.

AROUND A CORNER from Elaine Nelson’s room, on the other side of a long corridor, LifeCare nursing director Gina Isbell walked into a meeting in progress between several other staff members and the fluffy-haired doctor with whom she’d shared her tea. Her staff nurse and friend Andre Gremillion was crying and shaking his head. He brushed past Isbell into the hallway, and she followed, grabbing his arm and guiding him to an empty room.

“I can’t do this,” he kept saying.

“Do what?” Isbell asked. When Gremillion wouldn’t answer, Isbell hugged him and tried to comfort him. “It’s going to be OK,” she said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

Isbell searched for her boss, LifeCare’s pregnant assistant administrator, Diane Robichaux. “What is going on?” Isbell asked, frantic.

Robichaux told her that staff members from Memorial had arrived and were taking over the care of their patients.

“Are they going to do something with these patients?”

“Yeah, they are,” Robichaux said, in tears. “Our patients aren’t going to be evacuated. They aren’t going to leave.”

Isbell swore. She cried. She asked Robichaux why no one was coming to help. Robichaux didn’t have an answer.

Robichaux said the task now was to get all the staff off the floor except the core leadership team. Isbell tried not to think about what was going to happen. For five days she and her colleagues had tried so hard to keep everyone alive. She didn’t want to accept that they couldn’t save everyone who had made it this far. A colleague
told her that they were under martial law. Isbell believed she had to follow orders. She did what she was instructed to do.

Isbell, Robichaux, and other LifeCare leaders split into two groups and headed for different parts of the floor. “Everybody get out of here now,” they told the nurses who were on duty. “Get your stuff, we got to go now. Let’s go!” Cindy Chatelain, about to pass medicines to Elaine Nelson, was told to drop everything and leave without so much as signing off her patients to another caregiver. Andre Gremillion, who was tending to two patients, was told to go. He asked if someone would care for the patients. “Yeah,” he was told. “Get your bags and go ahead and evacuate now.”

As the LifeCare administrators cleared the floor of all but a few senior staff members, Robichaux sent Isbell to the back staircase to make sure nobody reentered. It was quiet there, and Isbell was grateful to sink into a chair. She sat alone, itching from a heat rash, aching from oozing skin wounds, drained and upset. Isbell let the occasional staff member through to retrieve belongings from the closets. She saw the fluffy-haired doctor walking back and forth for a while, and then noticed that she had gone. She thought again of her promise to Alice Hutzler’s daughter and felt a pang of guilt. She prayed that help would come before her patients died; she didn’t want to believe that no one would come.