Five Days Memorial Storm Ravaged Hospital

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (Hardcover) Customer review from the Amazon Vine Program (What's this?) Sheri Fink is so scrupulously honest in this book that it is painful. Painful for everyone -- doctors, nurses, investigators, attorneys and especially the families of those patients who died at the flooded Memorial Hospital immediately after Katrina. This is a story with infinite shades of gray. Were conditions so bad that extraordinary actions were necessary? Were medical staff serving their patients or their own interests? Were the investigators and district attorneys pursuing justice or reelection or personal advancement? In the corrupt world that is Louisiana (but to some degree everywhere), none of these questions has a simple, straightforward answer, which is what makes this book so fascinating and so sad. Every time I expected Fink to come down on the side of one view of the truth, she introduced a new point of view, a contrary one which was equally convincing and potentially valid. She tells the story calmly and methodically, but it rises to its own inevitable crescendo as the legal system grinds toward a decision about indicting the defendant medical personnel who were accused of homicide by injecting dying patients (and some not quite in that condition) with lethal doses of sedatives.

The story is in many ways a typical story of New Orleans' corrupt, good-old-boy culture, but it has ramifications far beyond that for anyone who comes to need the services of the medical profession (which is virtually all of us). Attitudes toward end-of-life issues are silhouetted in the harsh light of a disaster, and issues of proper triage during emergencies are thrown into relief.

My daughter was an undergraduate at Tulane when Katrina hit, and while the hardships this family suffered were minor compared to those for whom New Orleans was permanent home, it gave us a great appreciation of the depth and breadth of human suffering such a storm creates. One has sympathy for all of the victims (and all of the protagonists of this book were and are victims), a sympathy shared by the community at large who elected to forego prosecution and "revenge" for the larger cause of healing. This in spite of the fact that, as Fink writes in the final lines of the book, a Grand Juror was "convinced -- and, she believed, all of her fellow jurors were too -- that a crime had occurred on that fifth day at Memorial."


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