Summary Of Sheri Fink's Five Days At Memorial

I enjoyed how Sheri Fink wrote this book during the first half the reader gets a front row experience of being at Memorial Medical during hurricane Katrina and traumatic days that followed while the second half consists of the investigation against a doctor and two nurses for murdering patients. The prose is exceptional, it is very well researched with a big section of notes, it includes an index if for any reason you need to reference anything, there is a helpful list of selected individuals at Memorial during the hurricane, and two maps orienting you to the hospital. Anyone who reads Five Days at Memorial will have their own opinion on what happened and if it was done with or without malice. I personally believe that due to the circumstances the accused medical professionals made the right …show more content…
Could lives have been saved if patients had been transported to a building that had power to work ventilators also the ability to keep their core body temperatures lower? That we will never know. Some very bad decisions were made at Memorial during hurricane Katrina but euthanization was not one of them. As patients are rescued from Memorial they were not taken anywhere safer instead patients were abandoned on high ground such as on the side of the road and on the I-10 freeway cloverleaf. Five Days at Memorial is a must read for everyone.

“Didn’t military guys take a cyanide capsule to war, to have an option to avoid torture? And those, she reflected, would be people who would have hope for a meaningful life after their horrible torture. The people she saw on the second floor would, she thought, “have horrible torture and no meaningful life.” She knew it was torture, because the heat was hard enough on her, too, that, when she took breaks from working, she sought refuge in her air-conditioned car, grateful for having topped off her gas tank before the