While television relentlessly conveyed Hurricane Katrina's destructive impact on property, the catastrophe's human costs emerged most powerfully in the clarity of individual voices. In the following e-mail, one physician shared his experiences.
New Orleans Airport, Sept. 6
I am a member of the Texas-4 Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT). We are a part of FEMA. For the past 8 days, I have been living and working at the New Orleans airport, delivering medical care to the Hurricane Katrina survivors.
After a very rough first week, I am now better rested and fed. Our team was the first to arrive at the airport and set up our field hospital. We watched our population grow from 30 DMAT personnel taking care of 6 patients and 2 security guards to around 10,000 people in the first 15 hours. These people had had no food or water or security for several days and were tired, frustrated, sick, wet, and heartbroken. People were brought in by trucks, buses, ambulances, school buses, cars, and helicopters.
Our team has been working the flight line, off-loading helicopters. The CNN footage does not begin to do it justice. The roar of rotor blades, the smell of jet-A [fuel], and the thousands of eyes looking at us for answers, for hope. Our busiest day, we off-loaded just under 15,000 patients by air and ground. At that time, we had about 30 medical providers and 100 ancillary staff. All we could do was provide the barest amount of comfort care.
We watched many, many people die. We practiced medical triage at its most basic, black-tagging the sickest people and culling them from the masses so that they could die in a separate area. I cannot even begin to describe the transformation in my own sensibilities from my normal practice of medicine to the reality of the operation here. We were so short on wheelchairs and litters that we had to stack patients in airport chairs and lay them on the floor. They remained there for hours, too tired to be frightened, too weak to care about their urine- and stool-soaked clothing, too desperate to even ask what was going to happen next.
We did not practice medicine. There was nothing sexy or glamorous or routine about what we did.
Our team worked a couple of shifts in the medical tent as well. Imagine people so desperate, so sick, so like the 5–10 “true” emergencies you may get on a shift … all coming through the door nonstop. Now imagine having no beds, no O2, no nothing—except some nitro, aspirin, and all the good intentions in the world. We did everything from delivering babies to simply providing morphine and a blanket to septic and critical patients and allowing them to die.
There was a time when there were 16,000 angry, tired, frustrated people here; there were stabbings, rapes, and people on the verge of mobbing.
For those of you who want to help, the
next step is to help those who arrive in your local area. Talk to these survivors; hear their stories and what they have been through. Look into their eyes.
You will never think of America the same way. You will never look at your family the same way. You will never look at your home the same way. And I promise, it will forever change the way you practice medicine.