Through Hell and High Water

CHAPTER 1: THE EPIC STRUGGLE OF TWO HOSPITALS TO RESCUE THE ABANDONED

By Jane O. Hansen | Friday, May 5, 2006, 04:28 PM

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

New Orleans — It wasn’t the dark that scared Sherry Hebert. It was the silence.

The whir of the machines keeping her son alive at Charity Hospital suddenly shut off, signaling a failure in the backup power system. Sherry stood over her son’s bed in the intensive care unit where he lay unconscious. A ventilator had been breathing for him, an infusion machine pumping in his medication, a dialysis machine cleansing his blood.

Pointing a flashlight at a clear plastic tube attached to his bladder, she watched helplessly as the tube filled with blood. Sherry knew what that meant. Hunter, her 23-year-old son, would soon die.

I have to get him out. I have to get him help.

Across the ICU and behind a curtain, Carolyn Lewis read Scripture to her son Preston, and sang “Jesus Loves Me” and “At the Cross,” his favorite hymns. Like Hunter, Preston was on a ventilator. With the electricity off, he gasped for air. It seemed to Carolyn that her 25-year-old son was choking to death.

How is my child going to survive? What are they going to do?

The day before, on Monday, Aug. 29, Hurricane Katrina had roared through the city, snapping telephone poles, flipping cars, ripping off the hospital’s awnings and blowing out windows. When the power went out, the hospital’s backup generators kicked in. Now those were dead, too, the switchgears drowned in water that had appeared out of nowhere.

The two mothers had feared for their sons more than they worried about the storm. They’d met the week before in the sixth-floor waiting room of the medical intensive care unit the day Hunter was admitted. Carolyn, who had been there nearly a month with Preston, was a seasoned hand at the routine of living in the waiting room of a hospital; Sherry was the bewildered newcomer. They bonded quickly — two strangers united by the struggle to save their sons, then bound forever by Katrina.

It was not coincidence that brought Hunter Reeves and Preston Johnson to Charity Hospital. The young men were among the 23 percent of Louisiana adults lacking health insurance.

Charity was like Atlanta’s Grady, Chicago’s Cook County, New York’s Bellevue. One of the nation’s oldest continuously operating hospitals, it was a grand institution of an earlier era that rose majestically 20 stories above the city. Like the Statue of Liberty, it stood as a beacon for the poor and downtrodden.

For many in New Orleans, Charity was the only place they ever went for medical treatment. They were born there, and they would die there. In between, they relied on Charity’s emergency room, where they trusted they would get the best of care. A deeply revered place, the hospital was a wormhole between the parallel universes of those who could afford health care and those who could not.

Sitting diagonally across the street — and worlds apart — was Tulane University Hospital and Clinic, owned by the Hospital Corporation of America, or HCA. Built largely in 1976, the Tulane hospital was a seven-floor sterile-looking conglomerate of brownish brick buildings. No glorious art deco flourishes like those at Charity.

After Hurricane Katrina struck, the patients, staff and family members inside Tulane were just as desperate as those inside Charity. But the two hospitals could not have been more different. Tulane belonged to the largest for-profit hospital chain in the country. Charity depended on the state. One private. One public.

What happened to these two hospitals — and the hundreds of patients like Hunter Reeves and Preston Johnson marooned inside — is a metaphor for what happened to the city itself. The private hospital had lifelines and outside resources, as did many New Orleanians who escaped that week. The public hospital, an institution for the needy, had to rely on the government for help and wound up stranded, as did so many of New Orleans’ poorest. For the sickest patients at Charity, the government never arrived.

But the story of what unfolded inside Tulane and Charity is a tale not just of what went wrong, but of all that went right.

It is a chronicle of human goodness and ingenuity. Faced with an unprecedented loss of emergency power, medical professionals frantically rigged up crude devices and used their own hands to pump life into their patients. Stripped of the medical technology they had come to rely on, they could offer only Third World health care. Yet the result was a profound reconnection to the humanity of their patients. Each was no longer just a diagnosis.

It is also the tale of a daring helicopter rescue, a clash of hospital cultures, and a company that acted decisively and creatively, sparing no expense to save its people and patients.

The rescue operation was not perfect. People died. But many more lived. The perception of what happened depended on which side of the street the viewer was on.

But one thing is indisputable: More people would have died had individuals on both sides of Tulane Avenue not risked their own lives to save them.

Post-9/11, and now post-Katrina, there are lessons to be learned for when the next disaster strikes.

How had this happened? Sherry asked herself in the hot, dark hospital room. And why?

Hunter had always been healthy, so full of life, a tall, thin mischievous young man with wavy dirty-blond hair who had once dreamed of going to college on a baseball scholarship. He’d been that good.

Now he was on life support.

At 53, Sherry was a small, thin, reserved woman with shoulder-length blond hair and clear blue eyes that crinkled into slits when she smiled. She’d learned her son was gravely ill only a few weeks earlier. At first, she thought he had the flu. But when he coughed up and urinated blood, his family had taken him to the hospital near Sherry’s home in Robert. There, he was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder called Goodpasture’s syndrome.

On Thursday, Aug. 25, an ambulance had transported him across Lake Pontchartrain to “Big Charity” — the large public hospital that has served as a lifeline to generations of New Orleanians. Hunter had no insurance, and it was there that he could get the treatment that could save his life.

By Saturday, two days before the most destructive storm in U.S. history would make landfall, Hunter was showing signs of improvement: His lungs and urine were clearing of blood. The treatment was working. But soon the unthinkable would happen.

Preston’s illness puzzled doctors. They couldn’t figure out what was going on.

His mother thought he looked like a skeleton. He had always been slender, with a strong, athletic build. Now even his nose was skinny and pointed. His skin was yellow. He was on dialysis and couldn’t breathe on his own. But he was conscious. Sometimes when Carolyn appeared by his bedside, he opened his arms for a hug.

He had been healthy, working and living in Houston with his girlfriend when he became ill six months earlier. The cause wasn’t clear, but Carolyn suspected it was linked to a fight that broke out during a pickup basketball game. Preston took a blow to the gut from a metal pipe. When he didn’t recover, he moved back home to Lake Charles in southwest Louisiana to live with his mother and stepfather.

By then he was throwing up and losing weight. He refused to go to the nearby hospital. But when he passed out one night in the bathtub and nearly drowned, his family took him to the emergency room. Doctors said his stomach was engorged with blood, his pancreas damaged. After nearly three weeks, they recommended that Carolyn take her son to “Big Charity” in New Orleans because it was a research and trauma center. She believed the real reason was that Preston lacked insurance. He had let the payments on his policy lapse.

The family couldn’t afford to pay $4,000 for an ambulance, so they laid Preston down in the front seat of their 9-year-old Lincoln Continental for the three-hour drive. He was hallucinating by the time they reached Charity.

Now Carolyn watched as her son wasted away.

Mama promises I’m not going to leave you, she assured him.

At 54, Carolyn was short, with a full face, brown eyes and a deep religious faith. Every now and then, she walked to the other side of the nurses’ station to see Hunter. The medical intensive care unit held only 11 beds — and some of the hospital’s sickest patients. Hunter was in an isolation room, a small beige cubicle with a fluorescent light that no longer shone. She stood at the window looking in and prayed for Hunter and his family.

Taking breaks in the waiting room, the mothers shared stories about their sons. Sherry told Carolyn it seemed like yesterday that Hunter was fine — playing golf with her husband, Hunter’s stepdaddy. Earlier, she had introduced Hunter’s pregnant fiancée and told Carolyn how excited she was to be expecting a new grandbaby.

Carolyn told Sherry about Preston’s life in Houston and his two little boys. She saw so much of her son in her two young grandsons, Preston III and Jaden. Preston had a key chain with their pictures on it. When the nurses changed his bed, they hung the chain from the lamp overhead so he could see his boys, along with the wooden cross someone had made him.

The women felt close, and Carolyn even thought to herself that it was as if they were the same color. One black, one white, the two families took care of each other. They brought one another food, water and comfort. Carolyn told Sherry she was praying for Hunter. Sherry was doing the same for Preston.

Both young men already had come close to dying. Now the storm, and the power failure, threatened their survival. Their mothers would have to wait and see.

In places all over New Orleans, Katrina was raising a question:

Who would live and who would die?

ON MONDAY: Before Katrina hits, two hospitals hunker down, assuming the buildings will be safe. Chapter 2 of 22.

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By AJC | Friday, May 5, 2006, 04:24 PM

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Through Hell and High Water,” a serial narrative told in 22 daily chapters, reveals what happened inside two hospitals, one private and one public, during the days after the levees broke in New Orleans.

It is an intimate portrait of medical professionals who faced unprecedented conditions and acted heroically to keep their patients alive. It is also the tale of daring rescuers who came to the aid of those the government had abandoned.

As the official beginning of hurricane season approaches on June 1, this series offers an opportunity to examine what became a textbook example of disaster response.

To report this story, staff writer Jane O. Hansen interviewed more than 50 people over six months, beginning two weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit, when recollections were still fresh.

She spent time in New Orleans, where she went through both hospitals. To interview sources, she also traveled to Nashville; Houston; Columbus, Ohio; and the Louisiana cities of Baton Rouge, Covington, Robert and Lake Charles.

While the story may read like a novel, it is reported using the same principles of accuracy and fairness we apply in every article.

Dialogue and reflections recalled by participants appear in italics. The words are precisely as they remember saying or thinking them. Statements in quotes were spoken directly to the reporter or appeared in documents or media transcripts. In instances where people’s perceptions of events differed, both versions are presented. In reconstructing events, the reporter corroborated the details with multiple sources. All dates and times in the story reflect the participants’ recollections of the chronology.

Participants provided hundreds of photographs they shot during the week to document the events. Some are used in the series with their permission.

Finally, in each of the two hospitals, there were more than 1,200 people who faced extraordinary circumstances, and dozens of others outside the hospitals were involved in the rescue. Many who played important roles are not mentioned here. This story captures that remarkable week through the eyes of a handful of key participants.

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