Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink

Author:Sheri Fink [Fink, Sheri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-71898-3
Publisher: Crown Publishers
Published: 2013-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

SPECIAL AGENT Virginia Rider harbored a similar moral outrage. What had happened at Memorial was wrong. It was as basic as the tenets of her Catholic religion, but she wasn’t a rigid thinker. While she wouldn’t ever want to be euthanized, she could understand that some people in some circumstances would. She had no problem with the illegal acts of the then-imprisoned Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who had built a killing machine and helped patients die, patients with advanced cancers, with progressive dementias that robbed them of their memories and independence. The difference was that they had requested his services. The doctors at Memorial, as far as Rider knew, had acted without consent. Rider spoke with the doctor who had treated Emmett Everett before the storm. Despite his years of paralysis and many medical problems, Everett had seemed content with his lot and had told his medical team to do “whatever it takes,” including surgery, so he could get as well as possible and return home to the grandkids who visited him often and the wife who would never agree to put him in a nursing home.

According to his caregivers, Everett’s passion for life had remained strong throughout the disaster. One of his nurses, Cindy Chatelain, told investigators that she had helped round up food for Everett on Thursday morning. (It was tuna fish, crackers, and relish, according to another staff member.) Chatelain said Everett had eaten his breakfast and was alert and oriented. He had worried aloud about his wife and asked if the three other patients who had been his roommates, who had left, were OK. He also expressed concern about himself. “Cindy, don’t let them leave me behind,” she remembered him saying. She had promised him she wouldn’t. She lived now with a heavy burden of guilt and leaned harder on alcohol and prescription painkillers.

Rider spoke with Everett’s wife, Carrie, who told Rider that he had desired to live. She also gave the investigators a copy of a picture of him, the only one she had. In his photograph, Emmett Everett sat in front of a CocaCola machine in a cafeteria, holding a fork and a plate of food. He wore a tie and a white dress shirt across his broad shoulders. His eyes sparkled in the flash, giving him a boyish look even with a closely cropped gray goatee. Schafer, who was fond of nicknaming, began calling Everett the case’s “poster child.” The name stuck.

Schafer was also raised Catholic, like Rider, and he also was not an absolutist on matters of life and death. As an attorney, he had drawn up living wills for many people who wished to document their end-of-life preferences in advance of any problems. He, too, had done this, after getting older and thinking more about the issue. If he was a “vegetable,” he wanted that life-support plug pulled. But that was his decision. He didn’t want someone else making it for him.

While he felt it wasn’t his place to form opinions, given

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