Five Days at Memorial Explores the True Duties of Healthcare Workers

On August 12, 2022, Apple TV+ premiered the medical drama Five Days at Memorial. The miniseries is based on Sheri Fink’s 2013 nonfiction book Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital which documents the events that transpired at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Fink’s novel was an expansion of her 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning article published in The New York Time Magazine.

Five Days at Memorial explores the harrowing moments that the hospital experienced over the five days that patients and staff were trapped at the hospital. The series focuses on Dr. Anna Pou (Vera Farmiga), an otolaryngology surgeon who specialized in head and neck cancer, as she deals with the five days they were stuck at the hospital and the lawsuit that followed. The series also features Cherry Jones, Robert Pine, Adepero Oduye, Julie Ann Emery, Molly Hager, Cornelius Smith Jr., and Michael Gaston, who are all great in this dramatization of a tragic, true story.

The Sad True Story of Memorial Medical Center

Memorial Medical Center is a hospital located in Uptown New Orleans, Louisiana, and was the center of a euthanasia investigation after the events of Hurricane Katrina. When the hurricane hit New Orleans on Monday, August 29, 2005, Memorial Medical Center (which also served as a haven to the community during storms) suffered flooding and power outages but for the most part, got through the storm unscathed. The real problems began to happen when the levees and flood walls failed, creating what the American Society of Civil Engineers called one of the worst engineering catastrophes in U.S. history.

By Wednesday, August 31, the hospital was surrounded by water (some areas of New Orleans reported up to 10 feet of water) and nearly inaccessible. They had completely lost their generators due to the flooding in the lower levels of their building, there was no sanitation, and they were running low on food and fresh water. With the city power down, they had no air-conditioning causing the hospital’s indoor temperature to reach 110° F.

The hospital began evacuation plans (there were no written protocols for a flood evacuation) on day three with no help from city or government officials. Due to the elevators being inoperable, staff had to carry patients either down the stairs to await boats or up the stairs and to another building where the helipad was located. This effort was considered Herculean and an example of the lengths healthcare workers will go through to save their patients.

Heroes or Murderers

Memorial Medical Center had another big issue: they had leased out one of their floors to another company, LifeCare, which provided long-term acute care for severely ill patients. LifeCare and Memorial Medical Center were not part of the same corporation (Tenet Healthcare) and LifeCare was left to its own devices regarding aid and evacuation efforts. Although LifeCare did try to coordinate with Memorial Medical Center, Tenet did not include LifeCare in their evacuation efforts and left it up to both hospitals' staff to figure it out.

On Friday, September 2, the hospital was under evacuation orders from the city and managed to evacuate almost 2,000 people. During this evacuation, Memorial Medical Center assumed the care of LifeCare’s patients, most of whom were disabled. Nine of LifeCare’s patients died after Memorial Medical Center took over their care. On September 11, 45 bodies were recovered from the hospital with 23 patients testing positive for morphine and Versed (which can be a lethal cocktail that can cause pulmonary aspirations).

Five Days at Memorial is easily one of Vera Farmiga’s best performances as Dr. Anna Pou, the doctor charged with four counts of second-degree murder in connection with the deaths of the LifeCare patients. How the real doctors (specifically Pou) decided to euthanize patients is murky at best, but Five Days at Memorial does a great job of painting an honest picture of how those dire circumstances could lead to such heinous decisions.

A Healthcare Workers' Duty

In crisis and trauma situations healthcare workers are taught to assess the situation and assist the most critical first. But in situations when supplies and staff are running low, they are taught to assist those most likely to survive first. There are even designated armbands to help categorize patients by survival rate (black being the most critical). It is not uncommon for these practices to be used as we saw most recently with the pandemic. But it does not mean it is an easy decision,  and it does not mean you can euthanize patients or completely cease care if capable of being provided.

When you become a healthcare worker you take the Hippocratic oath, which states, “I shall never intentionally do or administer anything to the overall harm of my patients.” Doctors and nurses are required to take the oath, but all medical professionals are expected to uphold the oath whether they are required by law to take it or not. This is why the actions of Dr. Jack Kevorkian and others like him who practice assisted suicide are so controversial. For some, purposefully taking a patient’s life (whether that patient is willing or not) goes against everything a healthcare worker is taught and expected to uphold.

Five Days at Memorial does a great job at handling the conversation of the Hippocratic oath and the responsibility of healthcare workers. It shows the difficulties that these doctors (and doctors in similar situations) faced, especially when there was a complete failure of communication. Farmiga, along with the entire cast, delicately handles the material with conviction, leading to a raw and honest look at the duty of a healthcare worker and what is the right call (if there even is a right call) to make in one of the worst-case scenarios imaginable. This series is emotional and earnest in the telling of its story, creating one of the best TV medical dramas in recent years. Five Days at Memorial is now streaming on Apple TV+.

The original article was posted on November 2, 2022, and can be found on Movieweb.com.