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Wednesday, May 17, 2006
CHAPTER 12: RESCUE OPERATION UNDER BATTLE CONDITIONS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Multimedia
New Orleans — Tulane Avenue was the River Styx — as foul and fearsome as the Greek mythological river of hell. Yet brave souls crossed the waters from the public hospital to the private one, in hopes of rescue.
Wednesday evening, Aug. 31, Dr. Ben deBoisblanc, nurse Dawn Pevey and critical care resident Dr. Jeffrey Williams made the journey in the back of a National Guard truck with four very ill patients.
Dr. Ben had chosen Hunter Reeves as the first to evacuate from Charity Hospital, knowing the 23-year-old had a treatable condition but would die without medical care.
He had Goodpasture’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease causing his body’s antibodies to attack his lungs and kidneys. Several days before Hurricane Katrina struck, his right lung had collapsed. As the truck neared the ramp to Tulane Hospital’s Saratoga Street parking garage, Hunter’s oxygen level plummeted. Dr. Ben and the others suspected his other lung had collapsed.
There was no time to get him to a sterile emergency room. Under Dr. Ben’s supervision, Williams stuck a needle into Hunter’s chest wall. Air hissed out, confirming the doctor’s hunch. Hunter was no longer getting oxygen.
Four people would have to sit on Hunter’s legs and body for what came next. They had grabbed an emergency kit with surgical instruments before leaving Charity, but had no anesthesia. They could only sedate him lightly with medication.
Using a scalpel and guided by flashlight, Williams cut a 2-inch slit near Hunter’s left nipple, then inserted a tube between two ribs, allowing the lung to expand. Dr. Ben assisted the young resident while pinning down Hunter’s flailing arms. It would have felt as if someone were stabbing him in the chest with a knife, then wiggling it around inside.
If the streets of New Orleans were hell, the skies above were Armageddon. Helicopters flew in all directions; fires lit up the horizon; gunfire erupted sporadically.
Some pilots stowed body armor — courtesy of the Hospital Corporation of America and a police department — beneath their seats to stop bullets aimed from below. Like the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in 1975, the exodus from Tulane was a chopper-borne operation.
Oh, my God, this feels like a war, Tulane’s chief nursing officer would say, peering at the sky from the roof of the Tulane garage.
John Holland, the former military man acting as air traffic controller, put his arm around her.
Honey, you are in a war, he said. It’s just a different type.
If it felt like a war, it was also a well-honed military operation.
In two days, Tulane had set up a makeshift helipad, corralled nearly two dozen helicopters, fashioned an air traffic control system, organized patients into staging areas for evacuation, and arranged for each to be transferred to another hospital so care would be continued.
By Wednesday night, most of Tulane’s 178 patients were gone, including 58 brought over from the Superdome before the storm.
It may not have been evident at the time, but when Dr. Ben and his colleagues arrived that night from Charity, they left behind an environment bordering on anarchy and stepped into a hierarchical system in which people had followed commands and moved in lock step for two days.
Frustration and anger had grown at Charity, where time and again they’d been told the government was coming to rescue them. When the owner of a Missouri-based helicopter company promised to send four helicopters for Charity’s sickest patients, Dr. Ben assumed those choppers would be dedicated to his hospital. But it wouldn’t work that way.
When those from Charity arrived at the garage, they were told to stay downstairs. For safety’s sake, no one could be on the helipad except those loading patients and bringing in aircraft.
As director of medical intensive care at Charity, Dr. Ben was used to being in charge. He didn’t like being told to wait anywhere.
Maybe the seeds of enmity weren’t planted that night, just nurtured. There had always been some bad blood between the hospitals. Tulane was the for-profit facility owned by the wealthy Hospital Corporation of America; Charity was the poor public stepchild, neglected by state government, always short of cash, yet depended on to serve the city’s poor and forgotten.
After an hour, a truck came down to the first floor and carried Hunter to the rooftop, where he was loaded onto a medevac and taken away. Then the real waiting started.
For the next two to three hours, Dr. Ben and the others watched as helicopters landed and departed while their three critical patients suffered. One, 25-year-old Preston Johnson, began bleeding from the nose and mouth.
Finally, Dr. Ben radioed Charity to find out what had happened to the four promised helicopters — and learned they had come and gone. Other than the medevac that took Hunter, evidently the other three had carried out Tulane patients.
Dr. Ben was outraged. The government had abandoned them, and he felt Tulane was doing the same.
Yelling, swearing, he ran to the roof and demanded that his patients be evacuated immediately. They had no way back to Charity, and he was frantic about their safety. Holland understood the doctor’s desperation. He was also aware that the physician knew nothing about helicopters and rescue operations.
Doc, I’m on your side, Holland quietly told him.
Late Wednesday night, thanks to Holland’s military contacts, a Black Hawk that had no seats landed; it could take patients on stretchers. Holland put Preston and the other two Charity patients on board. Dr. Ben, Williams and nurse Pevey climbed in.
As they lifted off into the black, moonless night, Dr. Ben had a sense of the surreal. The military pilot wore night vision goggles, and Dr. Ben, wearing a headset, listened in on the communication in the cockpit. OK, slide a little bit left. Slide a little bit right. The buildings were so close, he felt he could reach out and touch them.
After about 10 minutes, Dr. Ben saw on the distant horizon what looked like Emerald City. As the chopper drew closer, he spotted a familiar sign for I-10. Then suddenly the sky lit up as they landed on a cloverleaf bathed in blinding lights. It reminded him of the movie “Apocalypse Now.” The lights belonged to ambulances — dozens of them — sitting on the highway.
Dr. Ben jumped out and approached a driver.
What are you guys doing here? he asked.
We’re waiting.
How long have you been waiting?
For three days, the driver told him, for patients who had never come.
ON FRIDAY: Two mothers learn the fate of their sons. Chapter 13 of 22.
