Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
By: Sheri Fink / Narrated By: Kirsten Potter
Length: 17 hrs and 33 mins
WOW! Kinda sorta leaves ya feeling like you were slugged in the gut
Lemme just get this outta the way: One of my pet peeves is sloppy audio production. You know, that whole thing where one paragraph sounds like it was read/narrated in a normal room, and the next paragraph sounds muffled, muted, or maybe louder even. Okay, so THAT’S the case here with Five Days at Memorial. Drove me nuts, cuz I’m suuuper thin-skinned that way. Kirsten Potter isn’t a “bells and whistles” kinda narrator; rather, she has the tones of a skilled documentarian, so uneven audio production paired with a no-nonsense approach to narration had me rather unmoved and detached at the beginning of this audiobook.
But then, oh man! I perked up right quick (After we had the obligatory history of Memorial Hospital along with the history and placement of its generators, after doctor Anna Pou’s life history and medical background). Hospital personnel and their families (along with pets) went to the hospital to hunker down for the storm, bringing mostly fun-types of junk food, expecting a couple of days at most of settling in place through the temporary ordeal.
Then all hell breaks loose. Windows are blown out, walkways collapse, the A/C goes out, there’s little backup power, and after the hurricane itself? Water starts gushing from manholes, and it starts rushing down the street: The levees are broken; the flood is here. Rumors abound about lawlessness, no help is coming. What helicopters CAN come simply can’t wait the time needed for evacuating patients due to the way the hospital is set up. Personnel have to carry people through flights of stairs and then carry them across the way, then carry them to the aging and decrepit helipad. The area is in chaos; the helicopters need to be out saving people—they can’t wait through the process.
A sort of triage is set up, with Dr. Anna Pou taking the lead, and she starts forcing tough questions, tough decisions. Sheri Fink’s writing is such that the listener feels the sweat and the heat, feels the fear and hopelessness, feels the sense that there are no options. The decisions are made and it’s decided that resources are to be used by those patients who might have a future, others are left to die as peacefully as possible. But that’s not all: The problem post-Katrina is that it would appear that some of the more hopeless cases were eased out of this life through lethal overdoses of meds injected into the patients. And maybe, one obese man who was doing well, was laughing earlier, may’ve been overdosed because he was too heavy to carry down the stairs.
Five Days at Memorial is a study of morality, of social mores, of making decisions when all seems lost. It chronicles (QUITE vividly!) how dire and chaotic things were, and goes on to the legal battles that followed. Fink never passes judgment, and her writing is so even-handed that you never get the whole It was right/It was wrong thing. It’s not until the very end of the book where she shows how Charity Hospital did sooo much better, and they probably did better because they were used to making do with little; they were used to chaos; they were used to coming together as a team and not listening to rumors. And Fink goes on to show how in other disasters throughout the world, there is dignity for all and a definite respect for those who still have even a single breath.
I was obsessively glued to the TV throughout AAAALL of Katrina and her aftermath, so I remember the phone calls from hospitals to the media, begging for help. I remember how desperate they were; I remember how they were talking of ventilating patients by hand, talking of how the heat was killing patients. I remember them saying they were setting up their hospital chapels as morgues. So I TOTALLY get how minds could work, thinking they, hospital personnel, were out of options.
But I dunno.
When all was said and done, after some pretty brilliant writing?
TOTAL slug to the gut, and I came out feeling like I should drop to my knees, thankful that I was NOT there…
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