A Book A Week - Week 39: Five Days At Memorial

This week's book:
  Five Days At Memorial  by Sheri Fink

Grade:  A-

"Brownie, you're doin' a heck of a job."  -  George Bush, 02 Sep 2005

I was in Virginia during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall on 29 Aug 2005.  I remember the 'heck of a job' quote, which seemed at the time such an incongruous, out-of-touch thing to say, what with people in New Orleans still calling for rescue from the attics of their flooded homes.
    After reading this book, I actually got angry.

If you were alive and over the age of about ten back in 2005, you remember Katrina.  You also remember the way every government entity, from the municipalities all the way up to the Federal government completely underestimated the severity of the storm, even though NOAA and other agencies warned of the bad things to come.  When things did turn from bad to worse in New Orleans, the situation was magnified by massive incompetence, failure, and miscommunication at all levels, and then compounded by panic and despair.  The author of Five Days at Memorial examines the situation in one of New Orleans' oldest hospitals at great length.

Why Memorial?  Because it's where doctors and nurses killed patients.  On purpose.

Yup, it happened.  Only three days after the levees broke, five days after Katrina made landfall.  Things in New Orleans had taken 72 hours to degenerate into a lawless, every-man-for-himself situation, one where health care professionals - at least a few of them - and one very overwhelmed administrator thought the best course of action for a few problematic, almost certainly terminal patients would be to end their lives.
   How could such a thing come to pass?  Read the book and you'll find out.

No one gets away without a scathing critique in this book, not the City of New Orleans, not the doctors and nurses involved in giving the injections that gradually stole the breath from their patients, not the Federal government, not the local police or National Guard, and especially not the corporate shills at Tenet Health Care, owners of both Memorial Hospital and the LifeCare business unit hosted there.

It's not an easy read.  For any other topic I'd say Ms. Fink makes the subject entertaining, but when she follows failure after failure and outrage after outrage it's hard to call that entertaining. Thorough, perhaps?  It's a case study in what can happen when precisely the wrong corporate culture intersects with precisely the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Heartbreaking.  And infuriating.

I loved it, even though it made me madder with practically every page, but I graded it down to an A- because it's so damned long.  In other non-fiction the extra page count came from extensive notes.  And there are extensive notes with Five Days At Memorial.  There are also 689 pages of text.  That's a lot of book by anyone's measure.  Not a light read at all.
    I think this book should be required reading for any emergency manager.  Back in 2005 none of the people in charge took their preparations seriously, leaving staff in an emergency with no direction, people who were unsuited to the challenge.  And medical professionals euthanized patients because of it.  An object lesson for everyone.

If you're a medical professional you must read this book.  You think it can't happen to you, but so did these doctors and nurses.  Aside from them, anyone who wants to understand how seriously incompetent the entire emergency response apparatus in the US was in 2005 should give it a look.  Keep in mind the events in the book happened four years after 9/11.  Let's hope they learned their lesson. 

Next week:
 Doctor Sleep   by Stephen King
My first Stephen King novel.  Really.  I saw 'The Shining' in the theater and loved it, but that was Kubrick, after all.   Before he even considered 'Eyes Wide Shut.'