HURRICANE KATRINA RN Relief Weblog

Gratitude From The Parker Family

Three CNA nurses are "the glue" for a family loosing a loved one in Mississippi

This note of gratitude is sent especially to express the warmest thanks to all of you for all your thoughtfulness: The Parker family are very grateful for the excellent care Ms. Dorothy Parker received while she was at Stone County Hospital in Wiggins, MS, during hurricane Katrina and afterwards. Ms. Parker was dying due to congestive heart failure and renal failure.

Three of your nurses who volunteered to help us in Mississippi after “Katrina” cared for Ms. Parker until she died on 9/12/05. I do not know all of their full names and the hospital wouldn’t give me their addresses – but I wanted you to know that their professionalism and compassion was the glue that sustained our family during Ms. Parker’s illness.

Myhanh Nguyan, Becky and Lauren were wonderful – they went way beyond the call of duty to provide guidance and comfort to us and to Ms. Parker. I hope they know how much we appreciate their sacrifices and concerns. We wish love and Peace to all of you

– The Parker Family.

I left a piece of my heart back in the Gulf

Lynda Moss, RN writes of her experience in the Gulf.

A reunion would be nice.  I did leave a piece of my heart back in the Gulf. I shall be returning soon for another 2 weeks. The people of the Gulf have left a life-changing impression on me.

The lack of health care there in NORMAL conditions is an embarrasment to our nation. The confusion with agencies in time of the hurricane disasters is another national embarrasment. Coming back to "civilization" was a difficult transition for me, as I wanted to stay and continue to make a difference....and we all did make a huge difference.

Thank you to CNA for affording me the opportunity to serve my fellow human beings in their  time of need. I am changed forever.

PS. I shall try to compose a letter to the editor of my paper.

Nurses from West Coast descend to help in Baton Rouge

Baton Rouge Advocate staff writer ELLYN COUVILLION writes:

After the tsunami struck Asia in December, a California nurses' union was able to send only six nurses to Sri Lanka to help. The organization wasn't able to get through the maze of red tape with major relief organizations to be able to send more volunteers, said a union representative.

After Hurricane Katrina hit, the union took matters into its own hands.

"We started making calls all over New Orleans," said Liz Jacobs, who works in communications with the California Nurses Association. At the same time, the union began to e-mail both member and nonmember nurses in California with a call to help the hurricane victims.

"We had nearly 1,000 volunteer," said Jacobs.

Through telephoning, a CNA staff member found Earl K. Long Medical Center in Baton Rouge, which was taking in patients evacuated from Charity and University hospitals in New Orleans. "Almost within a matter of days, our (patient) census had doubled," said AJ Varner, director of nursing for Earl K. Long. The hospital's staff nurses were picking up extra shifts after the hurricane, but, said Varner, "You can only go so far before productivity and alertness begin to suffer. You have to get relief."  "We call them our California angels," said Varner. (read more)

A Glimpse of What Single Payer Healthcare Could Look Like

CNA Staff Member, Joanne Jung, Coordinates RN Relief Missions

The failings of our government go far beyond and way way back than just this disaster -- the extreme poverty our nurses are witnessing, the consequences from lack of access to healthcare, and the very real racism toward the south are just a couple of the sundry complications of this. 

What we do know is that the nurses we're sending are making a tremendous difference in many lives.  We right now have nurses in New Orleans (clinic), in Gulfport Mississippi (clinic in a church parking lot), at University Medical Center in Lafayette (impacted by Rita), and at Earl Long in Baton Rouge (impacted by Katrina).  The hospitals are acute-care centers, with some staff who've completely lost everything to the hurricanes, and with staff (at Earl Long) having had a handful of days off since Katrina struck.

The clinics are like MASH units, from ED to outpatient. There are 8 other locations where CNA RNs have worked, in MS, LA and TX.  Lake Charles, LA, was one location, a clinic/shelter set up for Katrina victims.  When Rita struck, our RNs there evacuated to Shreveport along with the clinic/shelter.  3 RNs were working in Cameron, LA right before Rita, which proceeded to devastate the entire town.

Returning RNs have said they will never be the same again.  Some are still unable to speak about portions of their experience.  Most have said that many are receiving medical care in this disaster that they've never received their entire lives, since right now normal "standards" don't apply (reports of people who've needed things like eyeglasses or prescriptions for decades could finally obtain them under these conditions).  We may be responding to a natural disaster, but we're also responding to the disaster of our healthcare system and getting a glimpse of what single payer could look like.

"Thank you Miss Diane. Thank you for coming to help us."

A Registered Nurse from Detroit reflects on her life altering experience in Baton Rouge, LA.

Here I sit in a strange chair, breathing air I don't know in an airport I've never been in.  I am ill. I feel shaky and disoriented.  It's as if I'm time traveling and my cells are not configuring properly.

I left my home nine days ago and return a different person. Then I was a wife, mother, sister, daughter and a friend.  I worked full time as a nurse at a job I loved and felt useful at.  There were boundaries and boarders that I could define.

But then Katrina made contact with people's lives, and I went to help.  Was it for them, or to answer some need I felt?  I may never know.

I flew to a city I had never seen, paid for by a group I had never known.  I took my first solo taxi ride to a hospital that seemed to have been part of the distant past with the appearance of a jail.  Within 10 minutes I had a nursing license in Louisiana, and picked a bed out of the seven in one of the 6 rooms on 5N.  It was to be my home for the next nine days.

I immediately changed and went to work, and passed meds to people displaced, or left, or caught in a gun fight.  They spoke with an accent I had never heard, and often didn't understand.  Every staff member, nurse, supervisor, CNA, housekeeper, pharmacy tech, greeted me with a smile and a "Welcome Miss Diane."

Later, throughout the remainder of this day, I met the first of the 35 new faces I would commit to my memory, and to my heart.  All were nurses, all but one from California – a place as foreign to me as Baton Rouge.  All had come for the same reason, to help in any way they could.

We spent a week covering the floors, listening to the "war stories" of surviving not only the hurricane, but the time after.  The stories were offered by the patients, their family, friends, the staff, and any and all persons we met if we ever left the hospital.  Everyone seemed to need to talk it through to be able to make it part of their past.  We would start IV’s, do dressing changes, or sponge baths, and listen with our mouths agape, and our hearts leaking. This area was in shock. 

They had lost much of what tied them to who they were, and they were struggling to redefine themselves in this new world.  The staff of this hospital that had not had their homes destroyed and pumped into Lake Pontchatrain were exhausted from their valiant efforts to make a dent in the suffering.  And yet, every person I met greeted me with a smile and left me with a "Thank you Miss Diane.  Thank you for coming to help us."

Now as I try to put myself back into the role I had nine days ago, I can't seem to fit.  I know some of the patients are still in the hospital, the staff continues to care for them.  Some will rebuild, some will move.  The group of nurses, my new family, are also returning to their previous lives.  A new smaller group will fill our rooms again and help and listen while doing whatever nurses can.  And I sit here, in this chair, in this airport, on my way home and some of the cells that won't fit back in leak from my eyes.   

It was quite a week.  Thank you to the California Nurses Association for the experience.  You are all true to the profession.

News from Louisiana

Liz Jacobs, RN and CNA Staff Member, Joins Latest Delegation of Relief RNs

Early yesterday morning half of our local crew of 35 flew home after a late night of sharing stories, email addresses, and promises to send pictures.

Several CNA scrubs were signed by the entire crew and then were draped over the nursing station of 5 North, our command central, fondly referred to as their nursing campfire. There was way too food left over...no one had much of an appetite. The collective spirit and comradery was palpable.

These nurses have continually expressed their gratitude to CNA for the rapid response and extreme organization in moving so many nurses so quickly to places of need.  Many had tried the Red Cross among other agencies set up to provide disaster relief, something CNA was not. Red Cross told RNs that they would not practice nursing as they knew it because of legal liability concerns. Instead they would be doing vital signs- functioning at the level of a nurses’ aide.

New Orleans

Mud, mold and contamination describe New Orleans.   Except for the French Quarter and other high-ground well-to- do neighborhoods, that is the condition of most buildings.  There are very few residents -- maybe 1-2 per street and they can be found rummaging through the rubble of their former homes looking for something familiar.

The population currently in New Orleans is mostly rescue and construction personnel.  Todd Miller, an RN from Kaiser Oakland arranged for us to have a room at the Omni Hotel in the French Quarter paid by FEMA for 30 days.   Actually it is a FEMA hotel and they even provide food (for the most part) The quarters can only accommodate 4 nurses at a time. Housing is scarce and no one can believe we have this room. Lots and lots of military personnel still everywhere.

Currently we have 3 Nurse Practitioners, a Kaiser clinic RN and activist Pam Luiz. We are staffing several primary care clinics set up throughout the city and the surrounding neighborhoods.  We are serving the uninsured.

There are lots of people coming in with chronic conditions-(diabetes, hypertension) who have not had their medications for 6 weeks.  We provide loads of of tetanus and Hep A and B vaccinations.  We are also providing wound care and treating a multitude of respiratory infections that circulate throughout the shelters.

Our nurses check in daily with the medical director of the New Orleans Department of Public Health (DPH) and an MD affiliated with Tulane Medical school.  They are overseeing the clinics and decide which clinic to dispatch nurses to.  We are also staffing a mosque-based clinic in the poor under-served outlying area called Algiers.   CNA is getting lots of praise all around.

One of our RNs refused a request to be part of a photo op with Clinton becuase she didn't want to be a sell-out by being part of PR for the Bush Katrina money!

New Orleans’ Charity Hospital

An RT named Jean who had just joined our ranks and had been one of the last to go from New Orleans Charity Hospital has told and re-told his ordeal of trying to keep patients alive in those 5 days.  They had to use stairwells as makeshift morgues because the basement was flooded.  They put fake tracheotomies on patients to assure that the military would come back to evacuate them.  They hotwired a car in order to transport a patient who could not move.  They wandered through a darkened 700 bed hospital which averaged 110 degrees, while giving lessons on "bagging," that is, hand-ventilating patients to keep them alive.

Baton Rouge

With 35 RNs we have fully staffed Earl K Long hospital.

Our nurses were flexible and when not needed walked from unit to unit helping out by starting IV's, doing vitals, taking on an extra patient.  The normal patient load here before the hurricane was 50-60, but over night jumped to 130.

That has come down some, but the population of Baton Rogue has doubled and that is apparent on the streets which are clogged with traffic everywhere, all the time.  The two sister public hospitals in New Orleans, Charity (700 beds!) and University Medical Center are closed and I just read an AP story that they will need to be torn down and rebuilt.

The nurses from these hospitals are not coming in droves to Earl K as expected at this time because they have their own family-disaster to deal with and the state has provided paid leave until November 7th.

Lafayette

CNA/NNOC nurses are staffing a small public hospital about 60 miles west of Baton Rouge that has also almost doubled their patient load from Rita.  Shelters have closed in this area. The hospital is asking for 20 RNs in three categories: med-surg, OR, and telemetry.

Finding Jane and John Does

Kay Peters, a volunteer working from her home in Watertown, CT writes:  Thank you for running the Katrina blog -- the nurses stories are very good.

I'm a volunteer helping families separated by Katrina find their missing members. It's been a month since the storm now. Many of the people still missing are elderly patients with dementia or severe medical problems which prevent them from explaining to their caregivers who they are or where they came from.  It seems nearly impossible to hunt down all the Jane Does and John Does and match them with their families. I'm trying to make people aware of the problem.

I am collaborating with other volunteers like myself who have set up ad hoc bulletin boards and pool their resources to search for people. We have some successes, and that feels good. It's frightening, though, to see that there doesn't seem to be any official way of doing this.

Virtually all of the families register their missing members with the Red Cross and with FEMA, but that doesn't automatically initiate an active search.  The family needs to keep checking back to see if the missing person or his new caregiver has registered him in the same database with a current address.  If the missing person doesn't know his name, it's almost hopeless.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the National Center for Missing Adults is actively engaged in searching for Katrina's missing people, and I think when they get a new registry they do launch an active search.  The Alzheimer's Association has set up a hotline for Katrina victims, and I'm adding a link to their page at my web site.

I've started a web site where I'm collecting information on hospitals trying to identify unnamed patients and on families seeking relatives who can't speak for themselves. If your nurses are still volunteering services to the storm victims, they might find it helpful.

Find Hurricane Katrina's Jane Does and John Does Here
(Please bookmark this page link)

Thank you for all that you do.

'California Angels' Fly Into Face of Disaster

A SHATTERED GULF COAST - Volunteer nurses help keep a Baton Rouge hospital open, and spirits up

By Martin Miller
LA Times Staff Writer
October 3, 2005

BATON ROUGE, La. -- As the state capital's largest public health hospital, the Earl K. Long Medical Center routinely accepted people other institutions didn't like to, or simply wouldn't. But immediately after Hurricane Katrina struck, the hospital, critically short of staff, began turning away desperate New Orleans evacuees who not only couldn't pay but who had just lost everything.

The hospital, whose mission it is to care for those whom no one else does, was forced to close to new patients. Amid the scramble and chaos, hospital officials weren't sure how many were refused aid.

Then the California nurses came.

The first wave of about 30 volunteers landed within four days of the disaster, immediately helping the medical center to almost double its patient load. The nurses, from across California, rapidly integrated into the overburdened facility, relieving weary local nurses and expanding overall levels of care in all parts of the hospital.

Since the California nurses arrived in Baton Rouge, the hospital has been forced to divert patients only a couple of times -- but just for hours, not days. One of those blackout periods came during the transition between the first and second waves of California nurses.

"They are our California angels," said A.J. Barbier, the director of the medical center's nursing staff. "They received a round of applause when they showed up."

On Tuesday, the third wave of California nurses is slated to relieve the current crew.

In all, hundreds of registered nurses from California -- on their own or funneled through charitable organizations like the Red Cross -- have flown to the Gulf Coast, often on a moment's notice. (read more)