Through Hell and High Water

DR. BEN DEBOISBLANC

MEL LAGARDE

Chapter 19: CATCHING RIDES TO FREEDOM, SAYING THEIR GOODBYES

By Jane O. Hansen | Wednesday, May 24, 2006, 01:08 PM

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

New Orleans — By Friday morning, Sept. 2, Dr. Ben deBoisblanc was nearly a one-man operation on autopilot. As long as helicopters continued to land on the roof of the Tulane Hospital parking garage across the street, the impassioned physician was going to get his patients over there.

Wednesday, he had managed to get four patients from Charity Hospital evacuated by choppers; Thursday, about 30 more. All were critical and two had died while waiting in the garage.

But Friday more than 200 patients remained trapped in Charity, as well as about 800 employees and their families. Four days after Hurricane Katrina, they were nearly out of food, water and medicine.

Don Smithburg, CEO of nine public hospitals, including Charity, held a news conference at the state command post in Baton Rouge, pleading for help. Provisions were running low at Charity and University hospitals, he said. People were feeding themselves intravenously. They needed to be rescued. Today.

“I pray for that,” he said on air. He felt prayer was all he had.

Dr. Ben had given up hope that the Federal Emergency Management Agency or anyone else from the government was on the way. All week, he had heard that FEMA was coming, and no one showed. Occasionally, a National Guard truck or a Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries boat arrived to take away some patients. But there was no wholesale evacuation.

Some doctors had already flown out with patients. Dr. Ben could have gone, too. Instead, he had waded back from Tulane to Charity Friday morning to help others.

It was just like Dr. Ben to be there until the end, Celeste Waddell thought. The respiratory therapist had worked with him for years on the medical intensive care unit. All week, he had come around telling Waddell and others, *Believe me, trust me, we’re going to get you out of here.

*Many nurses on her unit were young, and afraid. One had come to Waddell and asked: *You’ve known him longer. Do you think he’ll get us out?

*Dr. Ben had always told Waddell that a person was only as good as his word.

If he said he’s going to get us out, *Waddell told her, *he’ll get us out.

Midday Friday, Dr. Ben arrived back on the Tulane roof with another group of patients. But this time, he found the place deserted, except for a police helicopter from north of Chicago.

Hadn’t they known he would be back with more patients? It was just as Dr. Ben had thought all along. They didn’t care about his patients. The Tulane people had abandoned them.

*The show’s over, *the pilot, Cmdr. Dan Bitton, told Dr. Ben.

You gotta help us, Dr. Ben said. *We got sick patients we need to get out of here.

*Dr. Ben didn’t know that executives of the Hospital Corporation of America in Nashville had offered to keep sending helicopters at its expense, and that Dr. Jim Aiken, one of those in charge at Charity, had declined.

Bitton’s aircraft wasn’t designed to transport patients on stretchers. But he agreed to get in the air and try to signal more helicopters to come to their aid. Once airborne, Bitton called HCA. Soon, the right kind of helicopter was on the way.

At Charity, a noisy exodus was by then under way. Susan Sanborn lined up with others against the yellow-tiled walls on the first floor, leading out to the emergency room ramp. Her own patients had been evacuated the day before, but now the staff were being told to grab their belongings. They, too, might get out.

Someone with a bullhorn yelled for a nurse to come to the front and accompany patients on a boat to Tulane.

Nurse, stretcher, go, go, go!

Sanborn’s supervisor pushed her ahead. Sanborn was unsure of herself. She was still a student, and they were calling for a nurse. You know what to do, her supervisor reassured her. You’re better than some of the nurses.

Sanborn didn’t want to be separated from her unit. But she and another nurse boarded a boat with patients for what should have been a short trip to Tulane’s Saratoga Street parking garage. Instead, the man piloting the boat took a long way around, to avoid a truck and two other airboats blocking the way.

When they eventually pulled up at “the beach” — the partially submerged first-floor ramp of the garage — Dr. Ben was there to drive them to the roof in a pickup truck.

If Sanborn had been frightened in her final days at Charity, it didn’t compare with the fear she felt in the ride to the roof with Dr. Ben behind the wheel. He raced up the ramps, tires screeching as he turned the sharp, steep corners to get them to a helicopter before it left. Sitting against the cab of the truck, she lifted her arms and held onto the rack behind her. Her two patients were taped to tabletops that served as stretchers. The tailgate was down, and she looped her feet under the tape to prevent her patients from flying out the back.

Sanborn vowed never to get into another moving vehicle with Dr. Ben.

As they neared the roof, she saw the evidence of a triage operation — empty oxygen tanks, rubber gloves, Ambu bags used to squeeze air into patients’ lungs. Wow, she thought, so this is where it all happened.

Despite the harrowing ride to the roof, Sanborn made it in time. She climbed into the helicopter with her patients, surprised and happy to find her supervisor and other nurses from her unit already on board. They had arrived earlier, and their patients had already been airlifted by medevacs equipped with their own medical staff.

As she lifted off Friday afternoon, Sanborn shared the feelings many experienced upon getting out. Operating in their own silos all week, they hadn’t seen the television images of mile after mile of devastation along the Gulf Coast. There was so much water, fires still burning, unbelievable damage. It wasn’t until they left New Orleans that they began to understand the enormity of what had happened — to their city, their hospitals, themselves.

But like others, Sanborn also would feel an intense pride. She had been part of something extraordinary. So few people had died in the face of so much danger.

One of the last people Dr. Ben helped evacuate Friday afternoon was a man who had been found at the side of a building doubled over in pain. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries had brought him to the Tulane garage by boat.

The man was lying on a piece of cardboard, clutching his abdomen. Dr. Ben didn’t know what was wrong, just that he was in so much pain he couldn’t speak. Dr. Ben noticed he was dressed nicely in khakis, as if he were a foreman or a manager.

As the doctor helped load him onto the chopper, the man’s hand opened and a set of keys fell onto the concrete. Dr. Ben picked them up. But as he reached to clip them to the man’s belt buckle, the helicopter lifted into the air.

The physician didn’t know who the man was, where he was going, whether he would survive. Like so many of Charity’s patients, he was heading to some unknown place, facing an uncertain future.

Dr. Ben thought of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Maybe he could find him one day and give him back his keys.

Dr. Ben slipped them into his pocket.

If she did not get out of Charity on Friday, Sherry Hebert had decided, she would swim out the next day. She wanted to get to her son Hunter. He had been the first Charity patient airlifted from Tulane’s parking garage Wednesday night. The water no longer scared her, not as much as the possibility of dying in the hospital.

But Friday afternoon, more than three days after Charity had been told FEMA was on its way, the government finally showed up with a cavalcade of boats and trucks. The water had receded enough that giant 18-wheelers could pull up to the hospital.

Like the Chinook helicopters that had sped up Tulane’s evacuation, the trucks helped do the same for Charity. As many as 20 people at a time climbed aboard — first the remaining patients, then family, and finally exhausted but jubilant staff.

Sherry was shepherded onto an airboat with Carolyn Lewis. The women had become friends in a hospital waiting room, worrying and struggling to keep their critically ill sons alive. Sherry had been there for Carolyn when the woman learned her son Preston hadn’t made it.

The day before, the two mothers had lined up to go out by airboat, but the rescue was aborted when the craft came under fire. This time, a member of the National Guard rode with them, his rifle pointed in the air.

Later Friday, Celeste Waddell left Charity in the back of an 18-wheeler. The respiratory therapist was taken to the New Orleans airport, where the military hustled her onto a plane to San Antonio. From there, she would fly to Dallas, where her sister lived.

Waddell had grown close to Sherry and Carolyn. The three shared the bond of motherhood. Each had a son. One had died, one survived, and one was long since gone.

As her plane left New Orleans, Waddell’s thoughts were of her son, Chris, who was buried there. She looked out the window into darkness.* I’m not abandoning you,* she told him.* You’ll always be with me.*

Dr. Ben oversaw the air rescue of 21 more patients from the Tulane helipad that day. By the time he arrived back at Charity about 3:30 p.m. Friday, the long-awaited evacuation of the hospital was at last in progress. It would all be over in a few hours.

Twenty-eight years earlier, as a young medical student, Dr. Ben had started his career at Charity. He’d done his residency there and never left. The hospital was central to his life, just as it was to New Orleans.

He was one of the last to leave. On the way out, he passed a sign welcoming people to a place “Where the Unusual Occurs and Miracles Happen.”

Dr. Ben cried. He had a feeling he would never walk through Charity’s doors again.

ON FRIDAY: Susan Sanborn searches for her patients; Charity officials publicly criticize Tulane. Chapter 20 of 22.

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