Memorial Medical Center had no evacuation plan for a disaster of this type, and staff were not trained in disaster management, even though the hospital had a history of flooding. Hospital staff occasionally heard gunshots in the surrounding neighborhood. No rescue was forthcoming from federal, state, or local disaster relief agencies or the hospital’s corporate owners. Then the levees broke and the water came.ĭarkness ensued, air conditioning stopped, and life support equipment shut down. “He would push 10 mg of morphine and 5 mg of the fast-acting sedative drug Versed and go up from there.” – Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospitalįive Days at Memorialis about five days in hell.Īfter Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on New Orleans, staff at Memorial Medical Center thought the facility and everyone in it had survived the storm intact. What I think really good journalism can do is to act as a rock in the middle of that fast flow to give people stable ground where they can stand and observe what is moving past them without being carried along by it.”īelow is a streamlined version of my original post about Five Days at Memorial: It’s so easy to be swept up in it and feel like you’re being carried along, feeling like you’re drowning in it. “I think of the information around the pandemic as rapids, really fast flowing torrential water. Here’s what Yong had to say about the current role of journalism in an interview with CNN: (Thanks to Tom Jones of The Poynter Report for passing this along.) For excellent reporting about our current pandemic, for example, read or listen to Ed Yong’s work in The Atlantic, especially his must-read article published today, “How the Pandemic Defeated America.” Secondly, I’m looking to pass along responsible, innovative journalism in this climate of conspiracy theories and misinformation. Fink’s can make these issues real for us in a way that is immediate and clarifying. Immersive and meticulously researched journalism like Dr. I’m including a condensed version of the post below, because in pandemic hot spots around the United States, critical care resources are being stretched to their limits – needlessly so, thanks to the scandalously inadequate national response to COVID-19 – as they were in Hurricane Katrina. I wrote about Five Days at Memorial on Books Can Save a Life in 2014. Fink won a Pulitzer Prize for her initial coverage of the disaster that played out in a New Orleans hospital serving the poor during Hurricane Katrina, and she is currently doing excellent reporting on the pandemic for The New York Times. When I was a practicing medical librarian, I read an extraordinary work of medical humanities journalism by Sheri Fink, MD: Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital.ĭr.
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