Dr. Ben deBoisblanc/Special
Nurses and resident doctors attend patients in makeshift emergency room in Charity Hospital.
Multimedia
- Print this
- E-mail this
- audio: Carolyn Lewis describes storm's fury
- audio: How Sherry Hebert comforted son
- photos: Chapter 1
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?
Permalink | Comments (20) | Categories: FrontPage
.JPG)
Services »
