Aging, Frail, and Refugees From the Hurricane

[AGBF]

The people of the Gulf continue to suffer the effects of Hurricane Katrina.

"The frail residents of the Wynhoven Health Care Center fled New Orleans and the havoc of Hurricane Katrina for a high school gymnasium, where they spent four nights sleeping on the floor with just inches between them. Then they endured a 10-hour bus ride to this rural outpost in northeastern Louisiana more than 200 miles from home that might as well have been the far side of the moon.

They subsisted on bag lunches, did without their insulin or blood-pressure medicine, risked infection from catheters that were necessary when no toilets were available, and finally arrived here at the Haven Nursing Center with no medical records and only the clothes on their backs.

It would take several days to figure out whose medications were whose because all of them had been tossed into one big plastic sack for the harrowing journey. It would take several more days before proper beds arrived for the deserted wing of the nursing home that had been slated for demolition and then hastily readied to accept them. Several more days would be needed to locate relatives, many of them homeless and scattered themselves.

And they were the lucky ones, spared the fate of 32 residents of a nursing home in St. Bernard Parish who were left to fend for themselves and died in the floodwaters."

For complete article go to:

"New York Times" article

Deborah

 

[AGBF]

If you haven't heard enough yet about those who were unable to flee Hurricane Katrina (due to their invalid status) to convince you that the victims were not to blame for their fate, here is some more reading material. This is from, "The New York Times".

"If some of those who died in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have been described as stubborn holdouts who ignored an order to evacuate, then these citizens of New Orleans defy that portrait: The 16 whose bodies were wrapped in white sheets in the chapel of Memorial Medical Center. The 34 whose corpses were abandoned and floating in St. Rita's Nursing Home. The 15 whose bodies were stored in an operating room turned makeshift morgue at Methodist Hospital.

The count does not stop there. Of the dead collected so far in the New Orleans area, more than a quarter of them, or at least 154, were patients, mostly elderly, who died in hospitals or nursing homes, according to interviews with officials from 8 area hospitals and 26 nursing homes. By the scores, people without choice of whether to leave or stay perished in New Orleans, trapped in health care facilities and in many cases abandoned by their would-be government rescuers.

Heroic efforts by doctors and nurses across the city prevented the toll from being vastly higher. Yet the breadth of the collapse of one of society's most basic covenants - to care for the helpless - suggests that the elderly and critically ill plummeted to the bottom of priority lists as calamity engulfed New Orleans.

At least 91 patients died in hospitals and 63 in nursing homes not fully evacuated until five days after the storm, according to the interviews, although those numbers are believed to be incomplete. In the end, withering heat, not floodwaters, proved the deadliest killer, with temperatures soaring to 110 degrees in stifling buildings without enough generator power for air-conditioning.

'The statement that you can judge a society by the way it treats elders and the vulnerable is a good way to look at our society,' said Alice Hedt, executive director of the National Citizens' Coalition for Nursing Home Reform. 'I hope this is going to be a wake-up call.'"

The excerpts above just scratch the surface of what happened. There is far, far more to read in the article. Perhaps we should ask our Congressmen and Senators to read it. Perhaps Homeland Security should make provisions for the infirm in case of future catastrophes, be they natural or man-made.


article


Deborah

 

[mightyred]

So sad and makes me realise how badly we treat the older and wiser amnongst us. Shameful.