Book #31: Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

It's hard to believe that this year marks the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I feel like I was pretty oblivious to everything that was going on, as a 16-year-old watching the news and hearing about the destruction--and particularly after reading this book, I know I was oblivious and had really no idea how extensive and severe it all was. In Five Days at Memorial, Fink investigates and reports on what happened at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, one of the hospitals that was flooded out and lost power during the emergency. The hospital, like most hospitals in the area, didn't evacuate its patients beforehand, because of the difficulty of moving so many of them--and usually, in the case of these emergencies, the hospital usually served as a safe home base for people to wait out the storm. In the case of Katrina, though, the destruction was so much more overwhelming than was expected, and there were between 1500 and 2000 people (hospital workers and their families, and patients and their families) to evacuate from the hospital--in addition to the hundreds and thousands of other people stranded at their homes in the area that also needed to be rescued. In the panic and craziness of the situation, doctors and nurses began to be sure that not all the patients would be able to be rescued--and in the end, they injected some 20+ elderly and very sick patients with morphine to hasten their deaths. There was a huge investigation after the fact and several doctors and nurses were put on trial for what happened. Fink interviewed hundreds of people to try to find out what really happened, during and after the emergency, and compiled it all into this book. Although the doctor and nurses accused of murdering these patients ended up not being indicted, Fink seems to think that they were guilty, although she turns it into a kind of "decide for what you think about this issue" at the end. I think they were guilty--they gave up on these patients and didn't even try to evacuate them and gave them drugs to hasten their deaths without even asking them or their families for permission. That is inexcusable. The first half of this book, detailing what happened during the disaster, was very interesting, but it really started to drag in the second half about the investigation and how the doctor and nurses were trying to clear their names and all their lawyers' tactics to clear them. Blah blah blah. I ended up skimming the last 50 pages because it wasn't worth all the effort to keep reading it all the way through.