Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink Read Free Book Online Page A

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 Southern hospitals to submit to integration. Medicare and other federal hospital programs were introduced in the mid-1960s, and hospitals were ineligible for reimbursements if they discriminated against or racially segregated patients. Baptist refusedto join the programs. “It is our conviction,” a 1966 hospital statement said, “that we can serve all of the people better if we remain free of governmental entanglements that would dictate the terms and conditions under which this hospital shall be operated.”
    New Orleanians sent supportive letters to the hospital’s administrator. “It’s heartening to realize that there are still some who do not succumb to the dictates of socialism,” one person wrote. “Congratulations,” wrote another, “on retaining the integrity of the hospital in the face of the ever growing pressure of the Federal government to take away the rights of the business and professional men of this nation.”
    The hospital began quietly accepting African American patients in 1968, in line with newly adopted nondiscrimination statements made by the Southern Baptist Convention. The denomination’s history was entwined with segregation, but its actions were now changing under pressure. The following year, in November,the hospital set aside its opposition to Medicare and began participating in the health insurance program for