Doctors, nurses step up after tragedy

I remember Dr. Ken Mattox, and so, I suspect, does every medical student and resident who ever graced the Ben Taub General Hospital emergency room in Houston or staggered in to the hospital, bleary-eyed, for surgery rounds at 6 a.m.

So it came as no surprise to me, 30 years later, to find Dr. Mattox, chief of surgery and chief of staff at Ben Taub, vice chairman of the department of surgery at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and trauma surgeon extraordinaire, smack dab in the middle of the controlled chaos at the Houston Astrodome, helping to organize, oversee and provide health care services to some 50,000 evacuees from New Orleans, stunned refugees from the devastation of hurricane Katrina. At least he had some warning of what was to come.

Across the way and a few days earlier in New Orleans, fellow trauma surgeon Norman McSwain drove over to Bourbon Street to see if his house was still standing (it was), then made his way back to Charity Hospital, the oldest, continually operating hospital in the country, the hospital that served one of the nation’s largest concentrations of the poor and uninsured.

There were no plans to evacuate Charity initially; they had weathered hurricanes before. A few days later, as the hospital generators were running out of diesel, as fresh water and food supplies dwindled, McSwain wondered where the help was. He called the mayor’s office. The governor’s office told him the governor was too busy to talk to him. A staff member sent out appeals to the National Guard on his BlackBerry. Finally, McSwain got a hold of a friend with press contacts. Tell them what’s happening here, McSwain told his friend. Get us some help.

Charity Hospital could not afford an emergency helicopter service. For this reason, it was one of the last hospitals to be evacuated.

Dr. Jim Aiken, an emergency department physician, weathered the storm at Charity, and after all patients were finally evacuated, he made his way to the emergency operations center. Now he is helping to restore and build neighborhood health centers. New Orleans residents will need them when they return.

Meanwhile, Dr. Hermant Vankawala, a member of a Texas Disaster Medical Assistance Team, helped set up a field hospital at New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong airport. He lived at the airport for eight days. Remaining New Orleans residents, thousands of them, filed through that airport. The emergency team had no oxygen, no beds for the sick, “no nothing,” Dr. Vankawala wrote. “We did what we had to do, and I think we did it well,” he wrote.

In hospitals all over the city, doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists and a myriad of other hospital workers, people who were surely desperate about their own homes and families, stayed to care for their patients. With no electricity, no light, no water or working plumbing, no air conditioning, no way to even open the windows for a cross draft, they squeezed balloon-like bags to get air into the lungs of patients who were hooked to now useless ventilators. They squeezed IV bags to get fluids into dehydrated patients. They did their best to make their dying patients comfortable. And they cried because they knew that many of them might not have died had Katrina not visited them.

Tens of thousands of doctors have volunteered to help the victims of Katrina. Now they are dispersing to the communities where evacuees are arriving. They are volunteering because these people need their help and they became doctors to help people. They are volunteering because this is medicine at its purest, doctor and patient with nothing between them. They are volunteering, and there are no fees to collect, no insurance companies to wrangle with, no HIPAA, no malpractice crisis.

They are indeed heroes. Read some stories from Katrina on the American College of Emergency Physicians’ website at www.acep.org and click on “ACEP Responds to Hurricane Katrina.”