In The Ruins, Angels Of Mercy
Without the barest necessities, doctors and nurses struggle to keep hurricane victims alive
April Fugere has discovered that it takes only about 36 hours to turn a modern American hospital into something more like a Civil War-era battlefield unit. "The stench is unbelievable," Fugere, an intensive care nurse, said from her post at flood-ravaged Charity Hospital last week, a few days after Hurricane Katrina battered New Orleans.
The hospital had no running water or working toilets. Food and bottled water were in short supply. The pain medication was long gone. When the emergency generators gave out, Fugere and her colleagues kept critically ill patients alive by squeezing their ventilator bags by hand. Rescuers had turned away after being fired upon, but by week's end, most of the patients had been evacuated. It was too late for some. "There are lots of patients who died," Fugere says. "They are laying them out in a hospital stairwell, in body bags."
From the flooded city of New Orleans and eastward along the Gulf Coast, doctors and nurses at dozens of hospitals and nursing homes last week struggled against enormous odds to keep thousands of seriously ill people alive without the most basic tools--food, water, medicine. The situation outside hospital walls was no better. Swarms of displaced residents with chronic health problems tried to make do without life-sustaining treatments like insulin and kidney dialysis. Even those who were healthy when the hurricane hit risked serious injury or death through dehydration, infection, or starvation as the week dragged on with no rescue or basic rations in sight. "We're seeing people who have been holed up in heated attics without food or water for days," says Christopher Guarisco, director of the emergency department at the Oschner Clinic Foundation in Jefferson Parish, La. At the New Orleans Convention Center, corpses lay abandoned amid throngs of people desperate to escape. A lucky few got out: Premature babies and other critically ill patients were airlifted to hospitals as far away as Houston. But most were left to suffer.
The healthcare crisis was exacerbated by the fact that hospitals weren't immune to the violence that erupted. "When the crowds tried to take the ambulances away from us, we just abandoned the ambulances and locked them up," says Richard Zuschlag, chief executive officer of Acadian Ambulance Service in Lafayette, La. In their second attempt to evacuate Charity Hospital, "we got shot at," Zuschlag says. But as National Guard troops began entering the city, the ambulance crews started moving again.
"It's utter chaos here," says Deano Bonano, chief deputy administrator for Jefferson Parish, just outside New Orleans. At midweek, the parish's hospitals were crammed with patients, most of them old or frail and in need of dialysis or oxygen, who were moved into the hospitals before the storm hit and had no place to go. "People are lined up in hallways, everywhere we can plug in a machine," Bonano says. "We're trying to relocate these special-needs patients to hospitals outside the area, but transportation right now is hard or impossible." Early in the week, he had taken to going out with the police or National Guard and raiding local supermarkets. "We are actually breaking into grocery stores," he says. By week's end, however, Bonano said Wal-Mart and Sam's Club had shipped in tractor-trailers with food, water, and ice, and power and water were being restored to the three open hospitals.
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