Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (73 page)

He thought someone would pick up the case again, perhaps a federal prosecutor. He didn’t believe the story was over. It would lie dormant and come back roaring.

FORENSIC EXPERT Cyril Wecht did not care if Pou was punished. What he cared about was the truth and what could be learned from it. For heaven’s sake, he thought, Memorial wasn’t on a goddamn battlefield with enemy shells coming in. This was New Orleans, and there were helicopters and boats. And really, were they saying they couldn’t get patients off the seventh floor? Given a choice, would someone rather die a painless death or live after being lowered, however uncomfortably, from a window? A great disservice was being done to the field of medicine, because the events were covered up and medical leaders reacted emotionally, without knowledge about what had happened. For now the lessons seemed to be that in a disaster if you’re a doctor, you’re in charge. If you feel giving large doses of morphine and Versed are appropriate, go ahead. It’s your call. “Is this what we want young doctors to learn?” he asked. “It’s a goddamn precedent, a very dangerous, bad precedent.”

ARTHUR CAPLAN, the ethicist, worried that without formal analysis, the case would remain “an unsettled moral toothache.” Bioethicists, not usually shrinking violets, had generally shied from sharing their opinions on this case. Perhaps some thought there was an underground practice of assisted suicide and euthanasia in America that seemed to be working and nobody wanted to shine a big spotlight on it. Many ethicists
felt the conditions at Memorial were so horrible that moral judgments could not be made about what happened there.

Caplan felt differently. “Why not there?” he would ask. He never received a satisfactory answer.

VIRGINIA RIDER and Butch Schafer did not believe justice had reached its end in the case. Justice did not require, ultimately, a conviction. It could be served in a retelling through the court process.

Pou, Budo, and Landry symbolized the people in whose hands everyone places their lives in times of sickness. It was imperative to know how they would react under pressure, to learn that simply because people were medical professionals did not mean they would always act in the interest of their patients, whether from a self-serving motive or muddled thinking.

This case had changed the way Rider looked at the world more than almost anything in her life besides her children. It had led her to set out her own end-of-life preferences very clearly in an advance directive: for example, that she should be removed from life support only if two doctors and a sister she had designated as her health-care proxy agreed; that she would want pain medicines, yes, but no more than necessary for pain, and not in an amount that would carry a great risk of killing her. Members of the public deserved to know the story, so that they, too, could use its lessons to make informed choices.

Most of all, the victims deserved to have their stories told. Rider’s position on Pou herself would soften slightly after the surgeon performed a daylong operation on a relative with cancer. Perhaps God was telling her she shouldn’t be so quick to judge people.

Schafer could understand Rider’s feelings about the case, but he was more sanguine. He knew what had really happened at Memorial. Whether anyone else knew it was not his concern. As a prosecutor, you
learned that many of the people you brought to trial wouldn’t be found guilty. You couldn’t spend your life sulking about it.

Years later, Dr. Ewing Cook would walk into a room at a small, rural hospital where Schafer had been admitted for the treatment of a possible lung infection. As Schafer lay helpless on the bed, hooked up to monitors and drug infusions, he marveled at the irony of the situation—his life now in Cook’s hands. To his relief, the doctor did not seem to recognize him from the day he had sat outside Cook’s door in the car while Rider handed him a subpoena. In the hospital, Cook was nice, cordial, with a dry sense of humor—a great guy, Schafer thought. Cook told Schafer there was nothing wrong with him. Schafer recovered.

Schafer believed the small, underresourced Medicaid fraud team had done the best they possibly could with the resources that they had. He was proud of the whole unit. They did not cheat. They had nothing to be ashamed of, contrary to public opinion. They’d been good. He would always have that.

ANGELA M
C
MANUS spent the entire day of the grand jury return crying. She phoned family members to let them know. “Now what?” they asked. McManus had no answer. She wished the grand jury had called her to testify. She still believed Pou was her mother’s murderer.

KATHRYN NELSON, Elaine’s daughter, didn’t feel angry; she didn’t necessarily want to see Pou in prison, but she didn’t believe she should keep her medical license. She had broken her primary oath. The nurses had too. What was to stop them from doing it again?

She thought of the wars going on across the ocean in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Americans didn’t leave their dead troops behind, no matter how intolerable the situation. But here at home a war against nature had been lost because some people were killed and left behind.

Her brother Craig moved forward aggressively with his civil case.

CARRIE EVERETT wanted to see justice done, to see Pou accept responsibility for her actions. Even though her husband, Emmett, had lost the use of his legs and the control of his bladder, and had depended on her care for nine years, she would still rather be bathing him, putting a diaper on him, laughing and clowning and arguing like every couple did—she would still rather have him there.

She wanted to know, what was the reason, what was the purpose? She didn’t know what happened; she wasn’t there to see Pou, to place her hands on the woman and say, “Don’t do this.” If she had been there, instead of trapped with her children and grandchildren in the flooded Ninth Ward, she was sure Pou would never have come into the room. Whatever had happened would not have happened. She would still have her husband.

RODNEY SCOTT, the patient whom Ewing Cook once took for dead, had made it home. He had suffered during the disaster, designated to go last because he weighed more than 300 pounds. He was frightened and hot and uncomfortable. He had hit his head in the helicopter, and had been left for two days in a paper gown at the New Orleans airport, in his feces, in pain. The trauma had lasted: the next time he’d had to be in a hospital, he refused to remove his street clothes. Still—and despite lingering medical problems that kept him from getting around much, that put him squarely in the camp of “the disabled”—there was no question
in his mind that it was worth going through all of that to survive and reunite with his family.

If nothing else was learned, what he hoped people took from Memorial’s misfortune was simple: “Every time you can save a life, save it.” If they could get him out, they could get everyone out. What had happened need not have happened. “There’s a way for everything,” he would say. Every option should have been explored.

When he was younger and healthier, he had worked as a nurse. He did not know whether euthanasia had occurred at Memorial, but if it had, he wondered what the doctors and nurses could have been thinking in deciding who would die that day. “How can you say euthanasia is better than evacuation? If they had vital signs, you could evacuate them … get ’em out. Let God make that decision.”