Summary Of Five Days At Memorial By Sheri Fink

Mistakes are inevitable. Before Hurricane Katrina most individuals evacuated the areas that were likely to be flooded. Hospitals, including Memorial, were not required to evacuate like everyone else. This meant that over two hundred patients were still in the building and even more staff when Katrina hit. Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink explores what happened inside the hospital during the aftermath of the storm and the legal battles that persisted long after the week people were trapped inside the building. There is a great controversy occurring regarding what happened inside the hospital after Katrina as well as what is acceptable behavior of doctors during any emergency. Major questions were left after the storm. Why did so many people

Were all of the patients’ best interests at heart? Was euthanasia used to hasten the deaths of some of the patients there? By the end of the novel, Fink’s answers to all of these questions are obvious. While it is obvious that Fink tries not to be biased for a majority of the novel, there are many moments where her personal opinion seeps into how the story was written. Fink’s bias can be seen through ethos, logos, pathos, and the organization and word choice of the text. Fink utilizes logos in a variety of ways. In many cases, it was simply to lay out the facts of what happened at Memorial, but a few times facts were clearly used to support her position. The facts presented include that the staff inside Memorial were exhausted. Marirose Bernard, a nursing director, said, “doctors and nurses had worked with, at most, an hour of sleep a night” (227). She goes on to discuss how they were

Near the beginning of the novel, Fink is sure to present just as many negative aspects of Pou as positive. “Those less fond of her found her overdramatic and hyperbolic-- to quick to blame others when something went wrong with a patient, as in Dr. So-and-So didn’t care enough or didn’t do a good enough job” (41). Fink also showed how Pou can be controlling which could be considering foreshadowing when her opinion of her later is taken into account. “The younger resident doctors, medical students, and nurses ranked below them and were expected to follow orders” (40). During the aftermath of Katrina, Pou was often the doctor giving the orders and expected nurses to follow them regardless of whether they were questionable or not. The word choice Fink uses does not help Pou seem to be a reliable character. “She struggled to explain why so many at Memorial had died” (230). The word choice of struggled makes Pou seem unsure of how to explain her actions and not confident in the choices she made. As Fink explains Pou’s actions she writes “perhaps to convince herself” which further shows Fink’s bias (230). The order in which Fink writes also gives insight on her opinions. She usually writes something positive first, moves on to a neutral opinion, then a negative. It can be considered fair because all three point of views are presented, however, it is biased because there is usually