NONFICTION
“Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital”
by Sheri Fink
Crown Publishers, 558 pages, $27
By Jason Berry
New York Times
Eight years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Floodwaters rose in the Uptown streets surrounding Memorial Medical Center, where hundreds of people slowly realized that they were stranded. The power grid failed, toilets overflowed, stench-filled corridors went dark. Diesel generators gave partial electricity. Hospital staff members smashed windows to circulate air. Gunshots could be heard, echoing in the city.
By Day 4 of the hurricane, the generators had conked out. Fifty-two patients in an intensive care wing lay in sweltering darkness; only a few were able to walk. The doctors and nurses, beyond exhaustion, wondered how many could survive.
When evacuations were done, 244 patients made it out alive; 45 did not. The state of Louisiana began an investigation; forensic consultants determined that 20 corpses had elevated levels of morphine and other drugs, and decided that seven were victims of homicide.
In her book “Five Days at Memorial,” Dr. Sheri Fink explores the excruciating struggle of medical professionals deciding to give fatal injections to those at the brink of death. Fink, a physician turned journalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for her investigation of these events in a 2009 joint assignment for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. This book is much more than an extension of that report. Although she had the material for a gripping disaster story, Fink has slowed the narrative pulse to investigate situational ethics: What happens when caregivers steeped in medicine’s supreme value, preserving life, face traumatic choices as the standards of civilization collapse.
This approach is a literary gamble, demanding more of readers than a standard-issue medical thriller would. But Fink, whose previous book, “War Hospital,” was based on her reporting in the Balkans in the 1990s, more than delivers. She writes with a seasoned sense of how doctors and nurses improvise in emergencies, and about the ethical realms in which they work.
Seven months after the hurricane, three Memorial staff members were arrested — Dr. Anna M. Pou, and two surgical intensive care nurses, Cheri Landry and Lori Budo. Ultimately, a grand jury refused to indict the women.
Fink maintains a reporter’s detachment in profiling the women as she explores the evidence and information from interviews, including Dr. Frank Minyard, the city coroner and a central witness, and Virginia Rider, a state investigator of Medicare fraud tasked with gathering evidence on the deaths.
By reporting the depth of those gruesome hours in Memorial, and giving weight to medical ethics as grounded in the law, Fink has written an unforgettable story. “Five Days at Memorial” is social reporting of the first rank.
