#LOST IN THE STORM SHERI FINK SKIN#

Hand-scrawled evacuation priority tags were taped to their gowns or cots. Others had blood pressures so low their pulses weren’t palpable, their breathing the only evidence of life. Some had the rapid, thready pulse of dehydration.

#LOST IN THE STORM SHERI FINK SKIN#

The languishing patients were receiving little medical care, and their skin felt hot to the touch. Supply cartons, used gloves, and empty packaging littered the floor. Now staff and volunteers-mostly children and spouses of medical workers who had sought shelter at the hospital-hunched over the infirm, dispensing sips of water and fanning the miasma with bits of cardboard. In preparation for evacuation, these men and women had been lifted by their hospital sheets, carried down flights of stairs from their rooms, and placed in a corner near an ATM and a planter with wilting greenery. Before them lay a dozen or so mostly elderly patients on soiled, sweat-soaked stretchers. Since the storm, they had barely slept, surviving on catnaps, bottled water, and rumors. Doctors and nurses milled in the foul-smelling second- floor lobby.

Floodwaters unleashed by Hurricane Katrina had marooned hundreds of people at the hospital, where they had now spent four days. AT LAST THROUGH the broken windows, the pulse of helicopter rotors and airboat propellers set the summer morning air throbbing with the promise of rescue.

Lost in the storm sheri fink