Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (79 page)

Information concerning Dr. Anna Pou comes from a range of sources, as detailed here. Over the course of the reporting, this included attendance at several events involving Dr. Pou, among them two fund-raisers on her behalf, two conferences, and several of her appearances before the Louisiana legislature. Pou also sat for a long interview, but she repeatedly declined to discuss most details related to patient deaths, citing wrongful-death suits and the need for sensitivity in relation to those who did not sue her.

PROLOGUE

Interviews

Dr. Horace Baltz; Essie Cavalier family (John Hazard, grandson); Donna Cotham family (Rosemary Pizzuto Cotham, mother); L. René Goux; Carrie Hall family (including Kimberly Rivers Roberts, granddaughter); Martha Hart family (James Harris “Judson” Hardy, Stephen Chalaron Hardy, and Jane Molony, cousins); Dr. Faith Joubert; Dr. John Kokemor; Dr. Daniel G. Rupley; Dr. John Thiele, Patricia Thiele; Karen Wynn.

Published Literature

Meitrodt, Jeffrey, “Katrina Nurses Called Victims of Justice; ‘Their Performance Has Always Been Exemplary,’ ”
Times-Picayune
, July 23, 2006.

Unpublished Documents

Letter from Dr. John Thiele to Dr. Horace Baltz, December 22, 2006; Memorial Medical Center Disaster Critique Mass Casualty Drill (sarin gas scenario) surveys, April 8, 2005; copy of Tenet Healthcare Corporation helicopter lease contracts and e-mails with Aviation Services, Inc.; photocopy of pilot log book; New Orleans Civil District Court records: petition to probate will of Martha Hart, case no. 2007-06959;
Hall, Kevin, et al v. Memorial Medical Center, et al
, case no. 2006-00127.

Miscellaneous

Photographs of second-floor lobby and doctors’ offices; video of airboat departures; e-mail correspondence between author and attorney for Susan Mulderick in August 2009.

Internet

John Thiele obituaries (
Daily Comet; Times-Picayune
) and associated online comments, family Facebook pages, and tribute sites (Lake Lawn Metairie Funeral Home website,
http://lakelawn.tributes.com/our_obituaries/John-Stephen-Thiele-M.D.-90423470
and
www.legacy.com
);
www.vitals.com
page on John Thiele; Harry Tompson Center website,
www.harrytompsoncenter.org
;
www.FDA.gov
for documents on midazolam (Versed), including labeling/boxed warning history.

Notes

  
1
pantomimed giving an injection
: Thiele recalled in interviews with the author and a fact-checker in 2008 and 2009 that Kokemor made this sign to him, However, Kokemor said in an interview in 2009: “Unequivocally, that never took place.” Kokemor did recall being on the ER ramp with Thiele (“He gave me his last two or three cigars”) and said in 2013 that he felt doctors had to stay until the end, because “it’s like the captain of the ship; they don’t go first, they go last.”

PART 1: DEADLY CHOICES

CHAPTER 1

Interviews

Dr. Ewing Cook; Minnie Cook; Curtis Dosch; Cathy Green; Dr. Faith Joubert; Eric Yancovich.

Published Literature

Greene, Glen Lee.
The History of Southern Baptist Hospital
, revised edition (New Orleans: Southern Baptist Hospital, 1976, and original 1969 edition).

Coverage of Hurricane Betsy in
The Triangle, Southern Baptist Hospital
, September 1965, including Raymond C. Wilson, “Thinking Out Loud”; J. Doak Marler, “How We Rode Betsy Out”; “Baptist Bears Betsy’s Brunt.”

“Ivan Knocked, Memorial Stood Ready,”
Connections
, September 2004.

“Baptist Hospital Admits First Patient, Mrs. Cotey,”
Item-Tribune
, March 9, 1926.

“Baptist Hospital Gives Treatment to First Patient,”
Times-Picayune
, March 9, 1926.

Articles and advertisements from the
Item-Tribune
, March 14, 1926, including: “Hospital Is Ready for Use”; “Facts About Baptist Hospital”; “Hospital Head Directs Work”; “Hospital Staff Comprises 127”; “Baptist Hospital Will Not Differ in Charity Cases.”

“Ideal of Christian Healing Voiced at Formal Opening of New Baptist Hospital,”
Times-Picayune
, March 14, 1926.

“Report of General Superintendent” and other sections of the
Semi-Annual Report of the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans, La.
, December 31, 1908, and period of 1926–1930.

“City Park Is Gaily Garbed for Great Festival Sunday,”
New Orleans States
, May 2, 1926.

Coverage of the May 2, 1926, storm and aftermath: the
Times-Picayune
(May 3, 4, 7, 9; August 26; September 12);
New Orleans Item
(May 3–5, 8, 11, 14);
Item-Tribune
(May 9);
New Orleans States
(May 3).

Coverage of the April 15–16, 1927, storm and aftermath:
New Orleans Item
(April 16 and 23) and
Times-Picayune
(April 16–21, 23–24, 26–29).

Barry, John M.
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

Documents

“The 1927 Great Mississippi Flood: 80-Year Retrospective” (Newark, CA: Risk Management Solutions, Inc., 2007).

Pamphlets and reports from the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, including: Marvin W. Johnson, “Report of the Baptist Hospital at New Orleans,” 1925; Louis J. Bristow, “Southern Baptist Hospital,” 1926; “Proposed Program Structure, Southern Baptist Hospitals,” undated; Louis J. Bristow, “The Heart of Healing, Unto the Least,” ca. 1930s; Louis J. Bristow, “Hospital Stories: Indicating How the Southern Baptist Hospital Is Fulfilling Its Task of Healing Humanity’s Hurt,” ca. 1930s. Issues of the
Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention
(1928, ’29, ’36, ’42, ’43, ’62, and ’68) for reports of the hospital’s work, philosophy, and finances.

Maygarden, Benjamin D., Jill-Karen Yakubik, Ellen Weiss, Chester Peyronnin, Kenneth R. Jones.
National Register Evaluation of New Orleans Drainage System, Orleans Parish, Louisiana
, 1999. Chapter 4, “History of the New Orleans Drainage System, 1893–1996.”

Notes

  
1
317-bed
: Tenet Healthcare Corporation, “Tenet to Create New Health Network in New Orleans,” October 24, 2005.

  
2
wrote in a letter
: Greene, G.
The History of Southern Baptist Hospital
, p. 60.

  
3
“The crying need”
: Ibid., p. 29–30.

  
4
with initial estimates
: These were cited in local newspapers and may have been high. A ten-year report of the hospital commission in
Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention
, May 1936, mentions “property losses in flood damages in 1926 and 1927 which cost us $43,220 to repair and replace.”

  
5
between $525,000 and $800,000
:
Minneapolisfed.org
. “What’s a Dollar Worth” calculator—$528,000 to $792,000, retrieved May 13, 2013.

  
6
Only once in the eight decades that followed
: Robert Ricks of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration searched NOAA’s database for the top ten rainiest days in New Orleans (Audubon station 166664) since 1871 for the author in September 2010. A storm on October 2, 1937, resulted in 13.08 inches, compared with the official 13.00 inches on April 16, 1927.

  
7
35 percent limit in effect at the time of Katrina
: According to
City of New Orleans, Louisiana
:
Basic Financial Statements December 31, 2011
, “The Louisiana Legislature, in Act 1 of 1994, increased the City’s general obligation bond debt limit to an amount equal to the greater of (i) $500,000,000 or (ii) 35% of total assessed valuation of the City.”

  
8
The Mississippi River floods of 1927 led to
: 1928 Flood Control Act. Seventieth Congress, session I, chapter 596; 1928, chapter 569, “An Act for the Control of Floods on the Mississippi River and Its Tributaries, and for Other Purposes”;
http://www.mvd.usace.army.mil/Portals/52/docs/MRC/Appendix_E._1928_Flood_Control_Act.pdf
.

CHAPTER 2

Interviews

Gina Isbell; Robbye Dubois.

Published literature

Landphair, Juliette, “ ‘The Forgotten People of New Orleans’: Community, Vulnerability, and the Lower Ninth Ward,”
Journal of American History
, no. 94 (December 2007): 837–45.

Unpublished documents

“Tenet Healthcare Corporation to Acquire Mercy†Baptist Medical Center,” May 17, 1995, Mercy†Baptist Medical Center (press release); hospital floor plans; LifeCare e-mails August 28, 2005, reporting that all patients were moved from Chalmette.

Notes

  
1
A hurricane watch covered a wide swath
: Hurricane watch including the New Orleans area was issued at ten a.m. local time on Saturday (1500 UTC). “Hurricane Katrina Advisory Number 17,” NWS/TCP National Hurricane Center, Miami, FL, ten a.m. CDT Saturday, August 27, 2005;
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/pub/al122005.public.017.shtml
. See also: Richard D. Knabb, Jamie R. Rhome, and Daniel P. Brown, “Tropical Cyclone Report—Hurricane Katrina.” NWS TPC/National Hurricane Center, 2005;
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/TCR-AL122005_Katrina.pdf
.
   A watch meant that hurricane conditions were possible in the watch area, “generally within 36 hours … Katrina could become a Category Four Hurricane.” In an expert witness report prepared for hospital defendants, including Memorial Medical Center after Katrina, meterologist Randoph J. Evans noted that the storm “rapidly intensified during the three days prior to landfall” and that the National Hurricane Center advisories and forcasts contained “omissions, uncertainties, and inaccuracies,” including a late warning that the New Orleans levees could be overtopped. Friday evening was, Evans writes, the first time that the NHC expressed confidence that the forecast tracks clustered on the New Orleans region. In advance of the 2010 hurricane season, the National Hurricane Center added twelve hours to the forecast period for watches (from thirty-six to forty-eight) and warnings (from twenty-four to thirty-six), and in 2013 further changes were made to increase the time for preparedness in advance of anticipated tropical storm force winds.

  
2
rated Category Three
: “Hurricane Katrina Discussion Number 17” (NWS/TCP National Hurricane Center, Miami, FL, ten a.m. CDT, Saturday August 27, 2005;
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al122005.discus.017.shtml
) issued at the same time as the advisory said that a strengthening to Category Five before landfall “is not out of the question.” It also noted that the official forecast called for “landfall in southeastern Louisiana in 48–60 hr,” meaning Monday, August 29.