Lessons learned from Katrina, 9/11, SARS, and other disasters
And so for the next 4 1/2 days, we struggled to keep these patients alive without electricity, without water, and on the surface that sounds like, oh, not such a difficult thing to do, but not only do you not have monitors and ventilators, you don't have suction, you don't have X-ray, you don't have laboratory, you don't have toilets that flush. I don't know about you, but the first thing I do when the toilet no longer flushes is I run to the bathroom because I don't want to be the last guy in - (laughter) - and so we had a sanitation crisis that was evolving. And in the midst of all this there was all these reports coming over our little transistor radios that the city was in a state of lawlessness.
And the first thing I want to say is, I was there and I didn't see that. I think those images make great press, but that was one percent of the story. And what that did was two things: one - three things: made you afraid to come in, made us afraid to go out, and it killed our morale. And it wasn't until we thought that the only way we were going to get out was to get ourselves out - because we couldn't communicate with the outside world. Cell phones were useless. Regular telephones - we dialed every number we could think of - the police department, the fire department, the National Guard, FEMA. Only one guy picked up his phone, and that was Wolf Blitzer - and right to the Situation Room. And we started to say, hey, look, we're still here - because at that very moment that we - it crystallized in everyone's mind that, you know, we're waiting around to be rescued. We're waiting for somebody to help us. What a bad idea that is. It creates a sense of helplessness, and all it did was delay our evacuation. At that very moment it became clear that we had to get ourselves out. We had to be prepared to handle - take care of ourselves.
And so we started talking to Wolf on the phone - one of our residents. And a guy calls up on a phone - only phone that worked in the whole hospital. And he says, you know, I run an air ambulance in Little Rock, Arkansas, and I'll send you some helicopters if you can find a place for me to land them. And so with our Tulane colleagues having torn down light poles on top of their parking garage, we floated these patients over to the parking garage, set up a little mini ICU for about 2-1/2 days, and got these patients out one at a time.
The most remarkable thing of the experience was not the medical stories, but the stories of humanism - of unskilled, very young, very frightened doctors and nurses doing what they'd always wanted to do.
So for me it was a very triumphant experience. We ran on adrenaline for those five days. The tough part is what is happening now - is the city is very broken. It was a poor city in a poor state to start with, and now the whole healthcare infrastructure is broken, there's no schools, there's no churches, there's no - there's no social fabric. And so how do you rebuild the social and healthcare infrastructure to make people want to come back when there are no people there to use those resources. Would you build a hospital when there's nobody to use it?
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