Book Review: Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

TLDR: “A little tedious, but still interesting” This is a story of a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina. It lost power, was surrounded by water with backed up sewers, and there weren’t enough boats or helicopters to evacuate everyone. Lots of people died. Maybe too many people. When the hospital lost power, all the ventilators shut off. A lot of patients were in immediate distress, compounded by the 100-degree heat and humidity. Conditions in the hospital deteriorated sharply. There wasn’t enough equipment or people to serve everyone, and without power, many of the patients had little to no chance of surviving. What happened next is the big question. The District Attorney maintains that a doctor named Anna Pou and two nurses entered the rooms of several doomed patients – many with standing Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders – and knowingly injected them with enough morphine to kill them. But did they? There were 45 bodies at Memorial – stacked up in a makeshift morgue in the…