Five Days at Memorial

I visited New Orleans only one time in my life and that happened to be about two months prior to Hurricane Katrina. I lived in NYC at the time and went down there for a music festival. When I got back to NYC, I couldn't stop talking about the pralines and beignets. Then Hurricane Katrina happened and as I watched the news coverage, I kept thinking about how I was just down there and how lovely it had all been. Like most of the United States, I saw the horrible conditions, rooftop rescues, extreme flooding, and deep despair. I wasn't a nurse at that time. I wouldn't start nursing school until about a year later. I was still working in the photography industry. So I didn't really give much thought to what the hospitals endured. Only after being a nurse now for a little over five years do my thoughts immediately go to hospitals and medical staffing in times of crises.

So when I heard the author of this book on NPR, I was all in. I had been so focused on the atrocity that was the Superdome, that I had completely missed this story about euthanasia in hospitals and nursing homes. This particular book hones in on Memorial Hospital in particular where there were an inordinate amount of dead patients found after the storm. Investigators dug further and the story that surfaced was one that is so tangled and speculative that you really hope it's not true. The author does, in my opinion, an excellent job of being objective leaving you to come to your own conclusion. For five days after the storm hit, patients and medical staff were essentially stranded in the hospital with no clear communication regarding rescue. When the generators failed and there was still limited to no rescue in sight, choices became desperate. Some patients were found with toxic amounts of morphine and midazolam in their system.  The question is whether or not those drugs were purposefully used to hasten death or were they used to provide comfort and death was a side effect?

There are so many layers to medical decisions that it's hard to pass judgment if you were not physically there yourself or if you were not the person in charge of the decision. After reading this book, I continue to think heavily about medical ethics, living wills and quality of life issues. The best part of the story was the first section where the five days are described in detail. The second part of the book is more about the legal and ethical challenges faced when attempting to prosecute physicians and nurses for suspected euthanasia. I found the book fascinating and really enjoyed it. If you are not a medical professional, you may find yourself bored or uninterested in the complexities, but I think it's a good read for anyone.

The Good Lord Bird

This is the March pick for the book club I attend.  I was excited to read it because I heard so many good things about it. Unfortunately when I started reading it, my excitement waned. I even fell asleep a few times.

The narrator, Onion, is a boy with feminine features whose father is killed during an altercation at his job between John Brown and a slave owner. This is the same John Brown who raided Harper's Ferry in 1859. In the frenzy of his father's death, John Brown takes Onion with him believing he is a girl. Onion, whose real name is Henry Shackleford, tries to explain that he's a boy, but never fully gets an opportunity. He is given a dress and that seems to be the end of that.

The rest of the book follows Onion as he continues to dress like a girl, yet seek true freedom.  However, the longer he remains with John Brown and his so-called army, the more he becomes connected with them. He sticks around to help them arrange the raid on Harper's Ferry. If you want a little historical background on the Harper's Ferry raid, Wikipedia has pretty good entry. Onion is not being held hostage or kept in slave bondage. He stays and returns of his own free will. He, in fact, has several opportunities to flee to the North and be free, but his growing affection for Brown's abolitionist ways keeps him there even when everything goes horribly wrong. Along the way he meets Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas. There is some chatter about how Douglass is portrayed as a bit of a womanizer, but I didn't see a problem with how it was written.

As I said, there were parts of this book that put me to sleep. John Brown's character for one. Every time he's talking, it's a drag and uninteresting.  Also any battle scene bored me to tears, but that's just because I've just never really been into reading about battles. The parts of the book I enjoyed were Onion's interactions with everyone outside of the group of abolitionists. How he deals with wanting to be a male, yet having to keep the disguise going in order to live is pretty entertaining. There are some comedic moments, but I never laughed out loud as some of my friends who read the book said they did.  I almost wish the book were just about a young male slave passing as a boy or vice versa trying to make it up North. That, alone, could make for a more compelling story. I really just found the book to be OK. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it. It's your call if you want to give it a try.