April Fugere, a registered nurse, worked in the surgical intensive care unit at Charity Hospital in the heart of New Orleans. As floodwaters rose around the hospital starting on August 29, the patients and staff there found themselves in an increasingly desperate situation–without electricity, running short on food, water, and medicine, and unable to escape. Fugere had brought her two teenage children with her so they could ride out the hurricane together, and they were trapped in the hospital, too. U.S. News has been following her progress. Here, in her own words, is the story of their struggle to survive:
"We're afraid. And we want to get out of here."
"We've been running out of everything. We had no clean linen to clean the patients with. Food was being rationed. We had to do manual ventilators because the emergency generators were flooded; then they brought us other generators.
"The stench is unbelievable. This is five days' worth of stench. We still have to urinate and defecate. We thought if we can just get the patients out of here. We were feeding the patients whatever we had: liquids, Resource, Boost. Some of them were on tube feeds, but we were running out of that, too. Fortunately, we got them out before we ran out of IV fluids. One coded last night, but we were able to get him going.
"We had patients with fevers; we didn't have ice. There was nothing we could do to cool them off, except for giving them Tylenol. It just lifted my heart so much to get the patients out of here. There were times that I was crying over my patients. They understood. They were really, really wonderful even though they were nervous as heck. Everyone just did great as far as how they dealt with it.
Full Story:
One nurse's diary [U.S. News & World Report]
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