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

Locations
Call Number: 362.11 Fi, Adult Book / Nonfiction / True Crime / Fink, Sheri
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	362.11 Fi	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / True Crime / Fink, Sheri	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Deadly choices -- Reckoning.
Fink provides a landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina-- and a suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice. 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. Fink unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Important book about multiple things, but author is not as neutral as she appears submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on July 21, 2018, 3:56pm This book is about many different things, and I don’t know that all of them are separated out quite as clearly as they should be.

This book is about the chaotic mess that was Memorial Hospital during the five days during and after Hurricane Katrina, how there was no disaster plan, and how that made for poor patient care. This is investigative journalism and was well done.

This book is about the public relations mess and legal proceedings that came after those five days. It’s about those who investigated and researched the case against the doctor and nurses, and about a grand jury case that was poorly prosecuted. It’s about a medical examiner who cared more about how he looked to the community than about the truth. If the facts of the book are right, THIS (whole section) is the most important part of the story.

The author also chose to make this book be about broad-based euthanasia, DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) orders, and end of life decisions. This is actually a somewhat odd place to take the book, and is very much a separate issue from Memorial Hospital being unprepared for a flooding disaster.

Again, the author uses this book to ask questions about who and how other places are ready for disasters, and this seems to me to be a logical place to take the end of the book. What do we learn from disasters, and how do we prevent them in the future?

Fink attempts to present herself as a neutral reporter presenting a balanced story, however, her choice of language throughout the book makes it clear that she has chosen sides. I don’t doubt that she is giving the reader all of the information that she has found, and I appreciate that she presents it in clear and organized ways, but her neutrality is definitely not as neutral as she would claim.

Nevertheless, I think that this is an excellent and important book, both about what happened at Memorial during and after Katrina, and because it raises important questions about how anyone and everyone should prepare for the unexpected (and the expected… a building in low-lying New Orleans with the generators in the basement getting flooded was not an impossible scenario).

Fascinating submitted by karenkay on July 31, 2019, 3:37pm The first half of this book contains info from a number of different people who were in the hospital at the time. It is truly terrifying to think of how unprepared we are for a disaster. It also speaks to what extreme exhaustion and fear can do to people.

haunting submitted by crp on August 22, 2019, 12:25am no wonder she won a prize for this reporting!