baronessekat | a book review

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

During the five days during and after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the medical care teams there were faced with brutal conditions and then even more brutal decisions that had to be made about the patients that had to be evacuated.

After everyone was rescued, investigators found many patients who had died, but an in-depth analysis revealed that the may not have died of natural causes due to loss of power and lack of supplies - instead, these patients who had been in either hospice care of in the ICU (and all had DNR orders) appeared to have been euthanized.

What's more it looked like the choices did not have to have been made had hospital officials done more than a cursory appearance - informing staff of available thing and easier exits (the staff thought they had to take patients out a hole made in a wall to get them to the helipad due to power being out and elevators not working - when there was a walkway that the management knew about and had been using to get to the nearby parking structure).

This book is an deep look at the reported events, how a system failed and people died. It even looked at how some of the lessons learned during Katrina were almost ignored when SuperStorm Sandy hit NYC.

I found this book to be both engrossing and VERY disturbing. And not just because it was written in 2013 and how back then they were running hypothetical scenarios for what would happen should something like the Spanish Flu pandemic hit a major city like New York and how unless steps were made, health care workers would have to make hard triage decisions, just like they did for Katrina and Sandy. And hey... in 2020 they had to do just that because no one wants to listen to Cassandra until it's too late.

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