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

go,” Burgess Guidi said to her mother. She told her she’d be back to see her on Wednesday.

    ALL STAFF MEMBERS assigned to work the hurricane at Memorial were to sign in by noon to pick up wristbands and room assignments. They parked their cars in multistory garages above the flood-prone streets. They emptied car trunks full of hurricane provisions onto borrowed carts and pushed them down the hospital corridors. Those with pets carried kennels and a requisite three-day supply of food to the medical records department on the ground floor, checking the animals into rooms that filled with the sounds of frenzied barking. They wrote the pets’ names on tracking forms and promised to keep them out of patient areas.
    Unlike many others, Dr. Anna Maria Pou didn’t bring much with her to Memorial when she arrived early Sunday afternoon: no family members, no pets, no coolers packed with snacks and junk food. It was the surgeon’s first hurricane at the hospital, and when she arrived the activity struck her as highly disorganized. She sought the company of the experienced operating-room and recovery-room nurses and offered to help them move equipment. The main hospital, an amalgamation of the 1926 building and subsequently built wings, was separated from Memorial’snew surgical suites by a bridge that administrators feared could collapse in the storm. Pou lugged supplies and equipment from the new building to an old set of operating theaters in the main hospital. She organized the rooms so that she and any other surgeon could operate in them during the storm if necessary.
    Other doctors retreated to private offices to sleep, but Pou had decided for the moment not to do that. She was there to work. “I’ll just sleep on a little stretcher with y’all,” she said to the nurses. They carried stretchers to an empty endoscopy procedure suite to create an ad hoc bedroom. Staff members set up a table and unloaded abundant, picniclike provisions, having been told to bring food for three days, the amount of time local hospitals and their employees were expected to be self-sufficient in emergencies. They watched as Pou unpacked only a six-pack of bottled water, crackers, tuna fish, and something that flashed in her hand. “What’s that?” a nurse asked Pou. “That’s a can opener,” Pou replied. Was that all she thought she needed? The nurses howled.
    Water, tuna, and crackers were all Pou had been able to scrounge up at home. She didn’t cook. Although she was beautiful, funny, and sociable by nature, at age forty-nine her life revolved around her surgical career.
    She hadn’t always known she would be a doctor, buteven her elementary-school classmates had predicted that the caring girl with the good grades would follow in her father’s footsteps. Dr. Frederick Pou was a Dominican Republic–born, New Orleans–raised internist, well known in the community but often absent from the family’s large, two-story white colonial on Fontainebleau Drive. His wife, Jeanette, was the daughter of Sicilian immigrants. She gave birth to eleven children, and he worked tirelessly to provide for them.He treated patients in a corner house in the Bywater, a working-class neighborhood on the opposite side of town. He sometimes scheduled office appointments until ten p.m. and returned home for dinner after midnight.
    Frederick Pou made weekend house calls, and his wife sent Anna Maria and her siblings along with him on alternating weekends so theycould spend more time with him. In this way, Pou learned early what a doctor’s job was.
    The children helped raise one another. Anna was the seventh, and her older siblings doted on her when she was little. One liked to dress her up in doll clothing and lead her across their lawn and the broad, tree-shaded street to show her off at St. Rita Catholic School. Later, as a grade-school student there, Pou listened closely to the nuns who taught her. They talked about purgatory and the importance of being