Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

a complication of the antibiotics
     used to treat the infection. To stay alive if her kidneys stopped working she’d need
     dialysis to clean her blood. Under no circumstances, she said, did she want that.
     The doctor discussed these preferences with Burgess, her sister, and a doting niece,
     then shifted the goal of her care from treating her medical problems to ensuring her
     comfort. She was scheduled to move out of intensive care and onto a regular medical
     floor as soon as a bed became available. Small doses of morphine had been ordered
     as needed to control any pain.
    Burgess’s daughter, Linette, had lived overseas for more than two decades with her
     Italian husband. Mother and daughter talked frequently, but visits were rare and often
     did not go well. While Jannie Burgess hadhelped integrate New Orleans hospitals, Linette had done the same for the New Orleans
     Playboy Club, becoming itsfirst black Bunny in 1973. This distinction had brought shame to the observant Catholic
     mother she referred to as a Holy Roller. Years of tension over various issues followed.
     Today’s visit was something of a reconciliation.
    With the mayor demanding that New Orleanians evacuate the city, the relatives who
     had driven Linette Burgess Guidi to the hospital were anxious to begin their exodus
     west. It was time to leave. She told her mother she loved her and thanked her for
     all she had done to raise her and make her the woman she was. “Release, let it 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