Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink. 558 pages.

Katrina caught everyone at Memorial Hospital unaware, but no one can really fault them too much for that, as everyone everywhere seemed unprepared. Mayor Ray Nagin called for local Hospitals not to evacuate, but when the water rose, generators failed (these were generators, never designed or tested for running the entire hospital for days and days, or for having circuits underwater), life-sustaining equipment failed, supplies ran short, and trained staff found that they were not trained for these kinds of conditions.
Fink documents, through most of the book, the events and the conversations that led to several seriously ill Memorial patients dying on the Thursday after the storm. No one was ever convicted of a crime in relation to the deaths, though Dr. Anna Pou and two nurses were arrested.
It is a fascinating story, and Fink does an admirable job sifting through the conflicting evidence. She is convinced, and does a very good job of convincing the reader, that some staff at Memorial made the decision to euthanize certain patients. Forty-five people died at that one hospital, and many of them had morphine present in their bodies when autopsies were performed.

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