Ask Me Why I Hurt (25 page)

Lorenzo looked panicky. “If this van gets stuck,” he said in his thick southern accent, “ain’t any way to get it towed from out here.”

Every new turn brought a fresh vision of devastation. It wasn’t long until even the worst of it seemed usual, and every block looked the same, with crushed houses and overturned trees. I tried my cell phone. No service. It was early, but the towns had a dark pall on them, even in the sunshine. Like ghost towns, I thought. The highway stretched out, occupied only by military and emergency vehicles.

“The director said the population is only two hundred and forty,” I told the crew, as we peered out our windows at Angie, Louisiana. The empty streets were littered with debris. The few stores were dark. Windows had boards over them; crushed roofs were crowned with tarps weighted with bricks. In the front yards were makeshift tents. People came wandering out to watch us. Two children sitting on the steps of a church stood up.

“Right this way,” an eager volunteer firefighter shouted, leading us to his station. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a logo that said “Angie Volunteer Fire Department.” There was a baseball cap over his shorn hair, and his young face looked drawn and worried. The fire station was a modest tan building with a sign that read: WASHINGTON PARISH, DISTRICT # 5 FIRE DEPARTMENT.
An aluminum folding door covered the truck. Spindly rails held up the porch. The roof was metal. We parked the van in front of the small building. Our windshield was spotted with the biggest bugs I had ever seen.

Mark jumped from the van. He was relieved that it hadn’t been raining. As an infectious disease specialist he worried about that. Rain would spread contamination and flood sewage into water supplies. Until pumps began working again, we would pray there was no rain. But even without rain the humidity made it hard to breathe. Just stepping out of the van, I was covered in a thick sweat that attracted dirt like a magnet. Being from Arizona, I had thought I could handle the heat. But early September in Louisiana was something entirely different.

Mark gasped. “This is like eating stew,” he said. Sweat immediately trickled down his face. His cheeks grew pink with trying to take a breath. Only the southern native Lorenzo seemed unaffected.

“Good old bayou weather,” he commented.

“You can set up right here,” the firefighter said. We ducked inside a door to find a small but clean room containing the firefighters’ kitchen. Sunlight poured through a window set above a sparkling sink. A long folding table had been set up to one side. The men had arranged bottles of hand sanitizers. This folding kitchen table would be our clinic. We would see some people on the van, we decided, but could fit many more in this fire station. We began bringing supplies inside.

“There’s no electricity, no running water, no Internet,” the firefighter told us. “We’ve got the only generator in town. We’ve been lugging it around town every day. Some of the old folks need it to run their asthma machines.”

Within minutes we had a crowd outside the door. Half the team began seeing patients while the other half hastily set up the equipment. The citizens of Angie seemed in shock. An eight-year-old boy screamed in pain as his mother brought him inside on a gurney made from a blanket. His mother explained that he had
been injured before the storm. Both his arms had been crushed in an accident. When the storm hit, the staff at the nursing facility where he was being cared for had simply fled. Like many others, they had gone north, thinking that they would be out of reach of Katrina’s wrath. Little did they know that the tornadoes and high winds would cause destruction hundreds of miles north of the coast. The boy’s mother had been trying to care for him all by herself, and infection had set into his wounds.

Another man was out of his heart medicine. “I tried to fill it when they said the storm was coming,” he told us. “But they said it was too early. Then the storm came, and I ran out. Now the pharmacy is closed.” It was a story I heard often as the hours passed. When news of the storm was coming, many people tried to stock up on medications. They knew they would be stuck in town because of lack of transportation or illness. It was smart thinking on their part, but the pharmacies refused to give any advance medications, especially for the poor on Medicaid. Now the pharmacies were closed, and people had been out of their meds for days.

“I feel stupid.” I groaned to Mark. “We stocked IV tubes for dehydration. They’re useless. We should have brought heart meds, antidepressants, albuterol, insulin.”

We worked for twelve straight hours the first day. Aware I was courting dehydration from all the caffeine, I fueled myself on Diet Cokes. There was no shower that night. When I stepped outside, bugs and flies, drawn by the smell of sweat, swarmed me. I felt unbearably greasy and sticky. I curled up in the back of the van to sleep. Dark fell over the town swiftly, and still, I had a hard time falling asleep. I was too aware of the unfamiliar night noises, too aware of the distance between Amy and the kids and me. I wondered what they were doing at that moment. I pictured Amy reading them stories in bed. I hoped the kids were being good for her and not keeping her up all night with demands.

Before I had even rubbed the sleep from my eyes the next morning, I was aware of the smell of swamps and moss and the fecund smell of things growing. The morning started early, before we had time to gulp instant coffee or eat a granola bar. The citizens of Angie came with chronically undertreated medical conditions that predated the storm: decayed teeth, poor nutrition, and diabetes in the young and the elderly. That morning a man came biking into town. He was so exhausted that the bike was swaying side to side as he rode. His hair was matted with thorns. He looked completely out of it.

“Biked from way down south,” was all he said, out of breath. He collapsed on a couch. He held out an arm, and I whistled at a huge septic wound. “Doctor, a few days ago this was just a bug bite, believe it or not,” he said. In the heat, without proper water or sanitation, simple bug bites were turning into a major medical issue. The similarities between these people and the kids I treated on the van were striking. I thought how tragedy always hits the poor the hardest and how misfortune multiplies when left untreated.

Later that day an elderly Cajun man appeared. He had a cloud of yellowing white hair above a liver-spotted face. He began telling me about his fishing that morning in the local swamp. “Fish are all spooked by the storm. Threw the line out and felt a tug. Turned out to be an alligator,” he said.

“What did you do?” I asked. He looked at me as if that were the silliest question he had ever heard.

“Hit that sucker on the head. Then I took it home, and the wife and I ate it. Best meal we had all week.” I was quiet as I took his blood pressure. His breath whistled. “Asthma,” he said after a while. “Ran out of my puffer.”

The next day a troop of national guardsmen showed up. “We were given orders to come protect your team,” one of the men told me. I told him I wasn’t sure we needed protecting. “We’ve
been trained to keep order,” he said, shifting his rifle awkwardly. The troop unpacked boxes of MREs, meal replacements, carrying them into the fire station. Famished, we crowded around. Without refrigeration or clean water, we hadn’t wanted to eat or drink anything local. Besides, food was in short supply, and the last thing we wanted to do was take it away from the townspeople.

“Check this out,” Mark said, reading a label. “This puppy has over three thousand calories.”

“How did they get that many calories in one meal?” I asked, disbelieving. “That’s enough calories for an entire day.”

The guardsman laughed, peeling back his own lid. “Lots of cheese and pasta. And cookies. They made them for soldiers who are working all day.”

I opened one and tasted it. It was ravioli. Before I knew it, I had eaten the entire dish. Great, I thought. Three of these a day, and they will roll me home.

“Have you heard about the locals eating alligators?” I asked the man. He was digging into a grayish stew.

“Sure,” he said, gulping. “They’re eating whatever they can get. I would too. There’s no food down here, besides what they can forage.” He took a sip from his bottled water.

“We’ve been sharing our food with the kids,” he said quietly.

He squinted up at the hot sun. “I sure wish they would send real help soon. These people are hurting.”

“You’re here,” Mark said, opening his meal.

“Yeah, but they need people to help fix their roofs and the electricity and get the water running. None of that is stuff we’re trained to do.” He hefted his rifle. “This is what I’m trained to do, and trust me, I don’t want to.”

The days moved at lightning, crackling speed. We worked fourteen and sixteen hours a day in Angie. Once we had Angie under control we drove our van into nearby towns, expanding our coverage
area to include Bogalusa and Pine. In the town of Pine a police officer came gasping in, and sat down in a waiting chair. “I think I had a heart attack during the storm,” he said.

I was shocked. “Why do you think that? Do you have any pain right now?” I said, reaching for my stethoscope.

“Pain in my chest,” he gasped. “And it’s been worse the last few days. Right now I can barely breathe it hurts so bad.”

I turned to yell at the others, “Anyone got any nitro?” As I turned, the police officer collapsed, nearly falling out of his chair. In seconds we had the paddles out and were administering CPR. Then he was sent by ambulance on to Bogalusa, where he was stabilized.

After about a week of our trip, we moved our temporary sleeping quarters to the empty beds at the LSU Bogalusa Medical Center. It was a spooky setting. The emergency room was functioning at a skeleton level. The rest of the hospital was abandoned and empty, with IV bags left dangling from hooks. I wondered what had happened to all the patients. Had their families simply taken them? I thought about the months our twins, hooked to respirators, were in the neonatal unit. I wondered how they would have fared if we had been here, during the storm, and the electricity had gone out. We took over the third floor as our temporary sleeping quarters, choosing rooms at random along the echoing hallways. Just looking at my plain hospital bed, capped with white sheets, made me feel depressed. This would be my home for another two and a half weeks. Though we had been in the area for only a week, it felt like months.

To lighten the mood, the team wrote our room numbers on the dry-erase board in the nurses’ station. Soon the board was covered with extra comments. Next to Catherine’s room someone had written that she needed four-point restraints. Michelle Wang’s notes warned she had bird flu. Mine made reference to a bad case of food poisoning I was recovering from. Desperate for something different from the canned meals, I had gone into the first restaurant to reopen in Bogalusa, even though Mark had warned me it was a bad idea. He was right. I got violently sick from tainted food
or dirty water. Despite the calorie-heavy army meals, I was dropping weight like crazy.

It had been several weeks since the storm, but we still had only sporadic cell phone coverage. The only places that had electricity were those approved as priority by the military, such as the hospital emergency room. The citizens still had no power to heat water for cleaning, cooking, or boiling drinking water. They were living in darkness at night, with no fans to cool their days. Weeks after the storm, and there were still no Internet connections. Illnesses were rampant. I wondered just what our government was doing. People were getting sicker. How long would they be expected to live under collapsed roofs, with no sanitation or ways to get clean? I longed to open my laptop and communicate with Amy or call her on my cell phone. I was allotted only two minutes every other day to call her on our clunky satellite phone.