Through Hell and High Water

DR. BEN DEBOISBLANC

MEL LAGARDE

CHAPTER 10: RUMORS, RED TAPE AND DESPERATE CALLS FOR HELP

By Jane O. Hansen | Monday, May 15, 2006, 03:19 PM

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

New Orleans — The story spread rapidly through Charity Hospital, devastating those who were scrambling to save lives but running out of time: Gov. Kathleen Blanco had announced that Charity had already been evacuated.

One nurse began to cry. We’re going to die. We’re never going to get out of here.

Many news reports out of New Orleans the week that Hurricane Katrina hit were wrong or skewed. The governor had told CNN on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that Big Charity, without backup power, was “not functional at this time, and we are trying to evacuate the patients there.” Soon after, the television network reported that Charity was already “being evacuated.” By the time the statement reached those inside the hospital, it had falsely morphed into a done deal: Everyone was out.

Over and over, they had heard that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was on its way to rescue them. Now they felt truly forgotten. No one knew they were still there. No one would be coming.

Student nurse Susan Sanborn watched as a nurse snatched up her two young children and waded away from the hospital in chest-high water. Looking down from her fourth-floor window, Sanborn cried. She didn’t think they’d make it. How could the woman risk her children’s lives? How could she desert her job and patients?

Another nurse from Sanborn’s unit was relieved of her duties and threatened with being sent to the psychiatric ward.

The misinformation marked a turning point.

Doctors and nurses began calling CNN, Fox News and anyone they could reach to get the word out that they were still there. Miraculously, the WATS line in Sanborn’s unit still worked. By Wednesday, the nation was getting a firsthand account of the life-and-death crisis inside Charity.

Among those put on the air was Krystin Smith, a registered nurse who was caring for one of the hospital’s sickest patients, 23-year-old Hunter Reeves.

“Our patients are sitting in feces, and just — it’s awful,” Smith told Paula Zahn of CNN. “I mean, we are — and not only that, we are scared for ourselves too because it’s becoming a hazard to take care of the patients, because we are now getting sick… . That’s why we contacted you, because we thought that you all would get it out there that we’re suffering here, that we’re not doing too well, and not just our patients, but us too.”

As chief of trauma at Charity and director of trauma for the Tulane medical school, Dr. Norm McSwain had loyalties to both Charity and Tulane Hospital. He was in Tulane’s command post most of that week. But as time wore on, his concern grew for Charity; he worried it was being left behind.

McSwain, 68, saw how the Hospital Corporation of America was mobilizing to get everyone out of Tulane. Mel Lagarde, an HCA executive, refused to accept no from anyone. On the other side of the street, the Charity administrators weren’t nearly as aggressive, McSwain felt, in part because they had been told the government was on its way.

A nationally known trauma expert who trained at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital, McSwain called a leader in the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians. We’re having trouble getting through to anybody who will help us out, he told him. Can anybody get through to somebody in the White House?

Within minutes, an Associated Press reporter and a reporter with USA Today reached McSwain on his cellphone. He told both that if Charity didn’t get help soon, people would die.

“Somebody needs to come in a hurry,” McSwain told USA Today.

“By ‘in a hurry,’ I don’t mean tomorrow or the next day. They need to get here tonight. By tomorrow we’ll have dead patients simply because they were not evacuated.”

Don Smithburg, chief executive officer over all nine public hospitals in the Louisiana State University system, including Charity, also felt powerless. Since Saturday, he’d been stationed at the state command center in Baton Rouge. Now he watched as Michael Brown, head of FEMA at the time, held a news conference at the center, blaming state and local governments for their slow response.

Brown defended his agency, telling reporters it was taking so long to evacuate hospitals because medical staff needed time to get their patients ready. Smithburg knew that Charity’s patients had been ready since Tuesday morning when the basement flooded.

He had been buttonholing everyone at the state emergency operations center. He pleaded for help from representatives of FEMA, the National Guard, the Coast Guard and any other government official who would listen.

The governor was also at the state command post, and Smithburg spoke regularly to her. Conditions in Charity and its affiliate, University Hospital, were dire and deteriorating, he told her. She too asked federal officials for help.

But there was no clear chain of command, and Smithburg felt buried under bureaucratic red tape. Instead of walking across the room and saying what he needed, he had to sit at a computer and type up a cumbersome e-mail request, whether it was for security or to evacuate two entire hospitals.

Three times, he was told the government was on its way to Charity and University hospitals. Three times between Tuesday and Thursday, he radioed the information to the hospitals: FEMA is coming! The National Guard is coming! A National Guard truck did show up Wednesday night and took away some of Charity’s less critical patients. But there was no wholesale evacuation.

In the void, more and more employees began calling Smithburg after someone obtained his cellphone number. He knew it was unusual for employees to reach out to a CEO, but he had become their lifeline. Some nurses sobbed uncontrollably, and he tried to reassure them.

They didn’t think they were going to get out. As their leader, he felt helpless.

Employees told him they were starting to feed themselves intravenously.

TOMORROW: Dr. Ben deBoisblanc tries to save his four most critical patients — including Hunter Reeves and Preston Johnson. Chapter 11 of 22.

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