Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink Page B

while before everyone realized he was no longer holding his breath. He wasn’t
     playing a game. He was unconscious, drowning in the shallow water.
    Someone hauled him out of the pool. His skin looked grayish. There was no doctor at
     the party. They were all just kids, most of them drunk and some of them stoned. There
     was a veterinary student, but it was someone else who reacted.
    Anna Pou rushed to the young man’s side, rolled him over, and bent to his lips. She
     blew breaths into his mouth and quickly revived him. Pou suggested he go to a hospital.
     He considered her advice, grabbed another gin, and went to play volleyball.
    Friends remarked on how quickly Pou had taken control of the situation. A few years
     later, she realized her father had been right. Being a laboratory technologist didn’t
     fulfill her. She applied and was accepted to medical school at Louisiana State University,
     where her father and uncle had also trained. She was thirty years old.
    One night during medical school, Pou attended an outdoor pig roast hosted by medical
     residents. She met one of their friends, a tall, handsome pharmacist who flew his
     own single-engine Cessna propeller plane. Theymade a beautiful couple, with personalities as different as their heights. Pou was
     outgoing, dramatic, and testy at times. She worked and played with gusto. Vince Panepinto
     was smart and engaging but more reserved. It took a few drinks before he felt ready
     to join her on the dance floor.
    Over the next few years of their relationship, Pou’s career took precedence. Panepinto
     followed her around the country as she did a surgery internship in Memphis and then
     studied otolaryngology, the “ear, nose, and throat” specialty, at a tough, exacting
     residency program in Pittsburgh. During her last year there, one of her brothers,
     five years her senior, died of lung cancer. He was only forty-three. The way the cancer
     attacked him was horrific. Pou said she was haunted by the way he “lingered.”
    While he was sick, Pou applied to yet another training program so she could subspecialize
     in surgery for head and neck cancers. She was accepted at a hospital in Indiana. This
     meant another relocation, and this time her husband Panepinto didn’t join her. He
     moved back to New Orleans to await the end of her training.
    If Pou was on a quest to do good in the world, she was taking it to an extreme. Many
     otolaryngologists had satisfying careers treating routine earaches and sinus infections.
     The field had a reputation among doctors as being one of the few surgical specialties
     to offer a reasonable work-life balance. What Pou trained to do in Indiana was at
     the most arduous end of the specialty spectrum. Microvascular reconstructive surgery
     was a mix of plastic surgery and cancer surgery. It was physically grueling and technically
     demanding. Some operations lasted an entire day and through the night.
    The goal was often to restore the ability to speak, swallow, and breathe in patients
     with tumors or injuries of the tongue, throat, larynx, and other parts of the head
     and neck. Pou learned to repair disfiguring defects by repurposing other tissues from
     the body. A rarely used thigh muscle could do the work of a tongue. A flap of skin
     from the forearm filled in for missing facial skin. A bit of leg or hipbone served
     to rebuilda jaw. Under a microscope, she sewed tiny blood vessels and nerves together to keep
     the tissues alive and restore function.
    In the academic medical world Pou had entered, fully trained surgeons—the “attendings”—ruled
     the operating theaters. The younger resident doctors, medical students, and nurses
     ranked below them and were expected to follow orders. Coming from a big family, Pou
     knew how to get along with people, but her respect for hierarchy had its limits. She
     turned on the Southern charm, manners, and deference with attendings who were good
     to their patients. Some of these