Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]
Author: | Language: English | ISBN: B00EF870X8 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink's landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina - and her suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice
In the tradition of the best writing on medicine, physician and reporter Sheri Fink reconstructs five days at Memorial Medical Center and draws the listener into the lives of those who struggled mightily to survive and to maintain life amidst chaos.
After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths.
Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting, unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the listener into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing.
In a voice at once involving and fair, masterful and intimate, Fink exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals just how ill-prepared we are in America for the impact of large-scale disasters - and how we can do better. A remarkable book, engrossing from start to finish, Five Days at Memorial radically transforms your understanding of human nature in crisis.
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- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 17 hours and 33 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Random House Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: September 10, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00EF870X8
The first half of this book reads like an apocalyptic thriller while the second half is like a legal drama and in fact was dramatized on the television show, Boston Legal.
The tragedy that occurred at Memorial Hospital in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is unflinchingly detailed by the author. The horrors that the staff and patients had to face will haunt you. The actions that were taken to save lives was heroic. There were also decisions made, however, that led to at least 7 deaths. Were these unavoidable casualties of the disaster or were these people murdered to effect a long overdue rescue of the remaining patients and staff?
The questions surrounding the deaths led to an investigation of one doctor and a couple of nurses. This legal investigation is what comprises the second half of the book.
The author, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, gives a fair and complete assessment of the five day ordeal in the storm ravaged hospital. There is also background information for many of the staff and some patients who were stranded in the flood. There were points that actually had me near tears as I read of their struggles.
The investigation after the incident and the legal battles which ensued are equally as compelling. The political machine that took over so much of the Katrina recovery is a big part of the story. The reader is left to come to his own conclusion based on the information given. Through the stellar reporting of this author, it is easy to empathize with both sides in some respects. Was euthanasia necessary? I'm not going to go into my own personal beliefs but I will say that you will look at the whole situation differently after reading this book.
You will also be forced to take a look at the choices available to us as the end of life approaches.
This is not the type of book that anyone should pick up if they are not prepared to deal with some extremely grim realities. Although certainly all of us have heard, and some of us have experienced personally, the horrors resulting from "natural disasters", Sheri Fink's exhaustively detailed description of events at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is uniquely powerful.
This is a book that SHOULD make one angry as well as profoundly and deeply distressed. It is also a fascinating investigation of the evolution of human perspective as "technical medicine" has become ever more complex and infrastructure-dependent. It includes an extraordinarily focused discussion of the historical issues - the fact that this hospital was flooded previously, but the necessary upgrades to provide better protection for the backup generators as recommended was never accomplished, being the most cogent.
For anyone who is not aware of the background story: As well as having a complement of "regular" patients, some in Intensive Care after such things as open heart and cancer surgery, the hospital had an organization called LifeCare that leased space on the 7th floor of the main hospital complex. Their patients were mostly elderly, and were in long-term care for extremely debilitating conditions that required extensive life support and monitoring, including dialysis, tube feeding, ongoing oxygen therapy, and so on. When the hurricane first approached, on Saturday, August 27, 2005, it seemed wise to move LifeCare patients in from a less secure, smaller facility in St. Bernard Parish, to the much larger location at Memorial.
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