I knew when I awoke in my call-room bed on the 17th floor of Charity Hospital, stirred awake not by the sound of a trauma beeper, but by a roach that had crawled into my bed and into my scrubs, that I would leave New Orleans eventually.
It was a city that frightened me.
Beyond my encounters with the roaches on the upper floors of Charity Hospital or the rats in its first-floor emergency room, I found frightening conflicts elsewhere, between life and death, rich and poor, white and black. I was uncomfortable and afraid then, but I am devastated now. The entire world has watched the destruction of New Orleans, and they are watching the forgotten and ignored citizens of New Orleans find their voices heard for the very first time in the tears and death accompanying Hurricane Katrina.
I arrived in the summer of 1997 to begin studies at the Tulane University School of Medicine and found myself in a foreign land. I was entering the medical profession, learning its own unfamiliar language and histories, and I was doing it in an alien city, far away from the small towns of Maine where I had been raised.
The fragile balance between life and death that my classmates and I were being introduced to in books and hospital rooms existed outside, as well. We lived among the city’s graveyards. We lived next door to grand old homes and smaller shotgun shacks, both made more beautiful in their visible decay. The city’s lush greenery, stunning by day, rustled at night with creatures more frightening than the five-inch roaches of its largest public hospital.
For every life-affirming parade we might see roll past our apartments, there was a patient inside the walls of Charity. And for every patient who somehow made it to that bed, there were unknown numbers whom we only saw on our required ambulance rides, when a night shift might take us into a tiny room in an apartment – an apartment with no furniture beyond a bed or two, an apartment where flashlights were required to find the front door because all of its outside lights had been shot out – where a family was caring for an elderly and infirm relative without outside help. An attending physician once commented to me that New Orleans was the best city in which to learn medicine, for where else could you get to see disease presenting so far along in its natural course? “People wait to come see the doctor until it’s too late.”
Poverty is the reason why people were “waiting” to come see us in the hospitals and clinics. Poverty is the reason why it was “too late” for so many left behind and trapped in the floods. New Orleans is a city where life has always been tenuous, even in its best and most easy of days. And the images of people stranded, fighting against dehydration, violence and treacherous waters, must not be forgotten.
New Orleans has never hidden its graves and caskets, and now it is showing us just as plainly what happens when we don’t think about what it means to be poor and what it means to protect our own, every single day.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tried to dispute allegations that the bungled rescue of New Orleans was racially motivated and asked, “How can that be the case? Americans don’t want to see Americans suffer.” She’s right. We want to think that everyone is taken care of and that everything is fine. But it’s not fine, and it wasn’t fine before Katrina swept across the Gulf, forcing us to finally watch our neighbors suffer.
They suffer every day, and we should expect better from our nation and its government. This is the issue that I hope stays with all of us, no matter the outcome of this heartbreaking tragedy.
Rebecca Whitney is a doctor living in Los Angeles. She grew up in South Paris, attended Oxford Hills High School and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hamsphire.
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