JAY – Barbara Hiscock’s voice broke as she talked about wanting to return to her family in Maine on Friday but not wanting to leave nurses at a New Orleans hospital that is short-staffed.
Hiscock, 28, a registered nurse from Jay, relayed her story via telephone Monday afternoon from New Orleans after touring some of the hurricane destruction aftermath.
“Oh God, it’s unbelievable. You cannot put it in words,” Hiscock said. “Some people have houses that had 15 feet of water in them. There is mold up to the ceiling in the houses; you can’t fix that. … It’s a ghost town.”
Hiscock is a member of the first six-nurse team from Maine that volunteered to go to New Orleans, she said. They arrived on Nov. 3 at the Touro Infirmary, the only adult hospital to re-open so far in Orleans Parish, a county that had a population of nearly 500,000 prior to Hurricane Katrina.
Hiscock is working as a medical surgical nurse and said she is “busting my butt” to do whatever she can to help.
“They desperately need nurses,” Hiscock said.
Some of the stories she’s heard down there “just make the hair on the back of your neck stand up,” she said.
New Orleans’ nurses and others at the hospital evacuated about 200 patients, including many babies, at the peak of the crisis, she said.
“I just see a lot of people in tears. … You see the pain in people’s faces,” Hiscock said.
She had previously participated in disaster drills in Maine and said what happened in New Orleans doesn’t compare.
“It makes our disaster drills seem minimal to what really could happen,” Hiscock said. “It’s unreal.”
Many of the nurses have lost their homes and belongings, yet still have the strength to come in and take care of patients, she said.
The 10-floor hospital closed down in September but reopened in October with only part of its nursing staff, Bill Clifton, Touro Infirmary’s interim director of human resources, said Tuesday.
There had been 500 nurses at the hospital pre-Katrina, and on Tuesday there were 289, not counting nurses from Maine, Clifton said.
Maine has been the only state to send nurses so far, he said, but he was working with other states Tuesday to recruit more.
The hospital’s patient census had been 250 patients before the hurricanes, but now has an average of 100 patients, Clifton said.
“There is so much need here,” Hiscock said. “They need help all the way around. It’s devastating.”
“I feel a little selfish to feel that I can’t wait to go home to see my family,” Hiscock said. She paused a moment to compose herself, then continued speaking.
A lot of people in the area are poor and a lot of them don’t have the means to get up and running again, she said.
Physically she is drained, she said, and mentally she’ll need a vacation after she returns to Maine late Friday.
“I’m here to do something and I’m proud of myself to be able to stick it out,” she said.
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