"There wasn't a lot of logic going on," she said. "The patients were getting hostile. Under dire conditions, you don't know how people are going to act."
At Lee's hospital, University, one former nursing-home patient died. Another death illustrated the violent backdrop against which the doctors worked -- a gunshot victim from the community who was brought in but couldn't be saved.
Around midnight on Wednesday at University, Dr. Stacey Holman, a 27-year-old resident, assisted in yet another birth.
"I held up a flashlight and one of my colleagues did the delivery," she said.
All the time she wondered, "What if we have to do a C-section? Can we do it without endangering the mom's life?"
By Thursday morning, McSwain had seen enough. From one of the few working phones at Tulane, he sought help from the media, saying: "We have been trying to call the mayor's office, we have been trying to call the governor's office ... we have tried to use any inside pressure we can. We are turning to you. Please help us."
As he was making his plea, Curiel was trying to rescue patients by boat at Charity, where his wife, Berggren, worked.
"I came down with my patients all the way from the ninth floor including people with spinal fractures," Berggren told CNN that night. "We actually loaded them on to boats, and we just saw a boat come back with some of our patients" because no helicopters were waiting to take them.
At dawn on Friday, Lee's fears were confirmed: Her 24-year-old patient's cervix was dilated and labor was progressing. With no functioning ultrasound equipment, doctors couldn't tell if this baby's head was too big, as the woman's previous child's had been. With no fetal monitors, they couldn't tell if the baby was in immediate danger.
They knew this: Women who have had C-sections are at great risk of a ruptured uterus in later pregnancies, especially if labor is difficult or long.
While she pondered the risks, the clouds finally parted. The military arrived in force and Chinook helicopters swooped in, rescuing the roughly 350 patients who remained at Charity and University plus thousands of staff, family and refugees there and at Tulane.
As for the doctors: "They were the last to come out of the doors. They would not leave until all the patients were out,'' said Sergeant Billy Gomillion, a rescue boat driver for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Enforcement.
Lee and her pregnant patient were airlifted to Slidell Memorial Hospital about 113km east near the Mississippi border. The woman gave birth to a healthy boy at 12:53pm on Friday, Sept. 2, after an emergency C-section that Lee and another doctor performed.
McSwain finally escaped the Tulane hospital on Friday night. One of the last to leave, he would have turned out the lights. But the hospital already was a dark, waterlogged corpse. As was the city he left behind.
RSS