Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink Read Free Book Online Page A

Orleans earlier that
     very week. The scenario assumed the presence of more than 2,000 hospital patients
     in New Orleans during a catastrophichurricane. No one had yet figured out how so many patients might be moved to safety
     in a flood, and federal health officials had not participated in the latest planning
     sessions.
    Dispatchers for the region’s largest ambulance company, Acadian, were swamped with
     calls to transport patients from threatened hospitals, nursing homes, and houses.
     Many of the roughly two dozen ambulances the company made available were frozen on
     the jammed interstate. To save time, some ambulances began delivering patients to
     the Superdome instead of taking them out of town.
    The main hospital in St. Bernard Parish, Chalmette Medical Center, managed to begin
     evacuating, but after the first round of critically ill patients left, ambulances
     never returned. Administrators from one New Orleans hospital wanted to move nine of
     their sickest patients to western Louisiana. But unless they could arrange an urgent,
     costly airlift, it seemed to be too late. The roadways were now so clogged with evacuees,
     the vulnerable patients could be trapped for up to a day in an ambulance before arriving.
     One nursing home had, before hurricane season, retained a New Orleans tour company
     at a cost of $1,400 to drive its residents to Mississippi in seven large buses in
     case of emergency. The dispatcher had reported on Saturday night that he only had
     two buses and no driver and would not fulfill the contract.

    AROUND MIDDAY, Linette Burgess Guidi burst into the intensive care unit at Memorial
     Medical Center, located her mother, and flew to her bedside. She planted kisses on
     her mother’s face. Jannie Burgess opened her large, almond-shaped eyes, raised her
     head from the pillow, and looked pleased. “Linette?”
    “Yes, Mother, it’s me. I’m here. I wouldn’t be anywhere else.” Burgess Guidi had arrived
     the previous evening from her home in the Netherlandsafter learning her mother’s uterine cancer had spread and was inoperable. She looked
     down at her mother’s hands in mock horror. “Your nails look terrible, Mother. You
     need a manicure.”
    Jannie Burgess had always been a lady who knew her lipstick, powder, and paint. She
     was seventy-nine years old now and obese, but in her youthful prime she had been tall
     with an hourglass figure and unlimited access to the beauty parlor owned by her older
     sister Gladys. She had fled an abusive husband as a young mother andlost her only son in Vietnam, but she knew joy, too, loved putting on the perfume
     and grabbing her daughter, Linette. “Let’s dance, let’s dance!”
    The woman drifting in and out of consciousness had a history, and Burgess’s theatrical
     daughter couldn’t resist describing it to the young, dark-haired nurse who had been
     assigned to care for her mother that day. The nurse was worried and distracted. Her
     husband had come into the unit holding their toddler son. He pled with her to leave
     town with them for safety, but the nurse stayed on duty.
    Linette Burgess Guidi took to regaling her with stories. Was she aware that Jannie
     Burgess was a licensed practical nurse who had worked thirty-five years in New Orleans’s
     hospitals and nursing homes? “Oh, really?” the nurse replied. “I didn’t know that.”
    Burgess had taken up nursing to support her children after working jobs as various
     as taxi dispatcher and secretary to a mortician. But practicing nursing in mid-twentieth-century
     New Orleans had presented an unsettling paradox for a woman like Burgess with light-brown
     skin; she could care for patients at many of the private hospitals, butcould not receive care at them. Though Jannie Burgess was born just a few months after
     Memorial opened in 1926 as Southern Baptist Hospital, it would be more than four decades
     before she could be a patient there.
    In fact, Baptist was one of the last