#five days at memorial

[fleurdelouve]

She's so pretty 🥺

[heavywithfire]

After 19 years, my Katrina PTSD has mostly dissipated, only really flaring up around the anniversary and whenever we have to evacuate from a storm.

And then someone brings up Sheri Fink’s Five Days At Memorial and then my mind just goes black with rage and I want to rip out their eyes with my bare hands.

[artemispanthar]

These are my top TV shows that I watched in 2022. As with the movies, I'm posting this now because I never got around to it last year.

Also like the movies, these are just what I watched in 2022, not series that came out in 2022. They also have to be new to me in 2022, so no series with new seasons that I’d already been following. These aren’t necessarily the best shows, just ones I really liked or made an impression on me. I’m including both running series and limited or miniseries.

These shows are in no particular order, I just arranged the posters how I thought they'd looked the best. The shows are:

This is Going to Hurt

Shining Girls

The Haunting of Bly Manor

For All Mankind

Unbelievable

Five Days at Memorial

Succession

The Patient

Yellowjackets

[belongstocaptaindoyle]

Ben Sanders in Five Days at Memorial as Hunt / S1 E2

[bigbigelliestan]

She’s so cute sos

[dekaohtoura]

[marnz]

we recently watched Five Days At Memorial, a drama about a doctor at memorial hospital murdering disabled people (””euthanasia””) during Hurricane Katrina. It was absolutely harrowing and horrific on every single level. Prior to this show I didn’t know the intricacies of what happened during and after the Hurricane Katrina--I was a young person on the other side of the country when it happened and the level of clusterfuck was such that it was years before we had a full grasp on what had happened and how bad every level of government response was.

But I feel that eventually, as a person, it’s on you to learn about stuff you don’t know anything about! The alternative is to just stay ignorant forever, which, nope. So I’ve been trying to read about it, and there is literally so much it’s been overwhelming. In my research I came across This Article on the Looting Myth, which I am linking here for archiving purposes. It disturbs me that it was the ‘looting’ I heard about as a kid, instead of how many levees failed, or FEMA being incompetent and led by a white man who lied on his resume, or GWB literally flying over New Orleans but not stopping to offer aid, or the racism that contributed to all of this, or the poverty that meant so many people could not evacuate, or that the levees breaking was the fault of the US Army Corps of Engineers but due to sovereign immunity they can’t be sued or really held responsible in a material way...

and I understand, a little bit more, why Five Days At Memorial was such a powerful story: there were horrific choices made and a lot of suffering and no consequences, which is just a microcosm of Hurricane Katrina itself. Dr. Pou, the murdering doctor, got away with it and is still practicing to this day.

anyway. more and more the early aughts feel like a time capsule because everything was so profoundly different and change has occurred in such a short period of time that it’s difficult to find the language to communicate just how different stuff was. it’s not the change, it’s the rate of change. it’s humbling. how so many things an entire generation takes for granted were started and normalized in that period. but then you see that a lot of things haven’t changed. the levees in New Orleans were conceived of and ground was broken in 1965. the project was estimated to take 13 years. hurricane katrina was forty years later and they still weren’t fully done, which just reminds me of the 1989 agreement to clean up hanford and properly store nuclear waste generated by the manhattan project, which is hideously behind schedule and facing budget cuts! federal incompetency and the lack of consequences of it continues.

[maxbitter]

[lover-praxis]

Epigraph in Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

[kwebtv]

Five Days At Memorial  - Apple TV+  -  August 12, 2022 - September 18, 2022

Medical Drama (8 episodes)

Running Time:  60 minutes

Stars:

Vera Farmiga as Dr. Anna Pou

Cherry Jones as Susan Mulderick

Cornelius Smith Jr. as Dr. Bryant King

Robert Pine as Dr. Horace Baltz

Adepero Oduye as Karen Wynn

Julie Ann Emery as Diane Robichaux

Michael Gaston as Arthur "Butch" Schafer

Molly Hager as Virginia Rider

W. Earl Brown as Ewing Cook

Recurring

Joe Carroll as Michael Arvin

Mark Winnick as Gun Doctor

[telly-tell-alls]

Five days at Memorial

A+

A plus plus actually.

Before I start let me refer back to a previous review as this show has an intro that will bring the whole family together. The introduction music gets stuck in my head every time and I find myself singing in the accent in which it is sung long after the introduction has ended. It has became my favorite part of the show. I recommend this show to someone and they are hooked.

I was on the phone with them while the introduction was being played and it was back stuck in my head. I watched this show awhile ago but it definitely needed to be highlighted

You can stream this fine piece of work on Apple TV , The show is a true story about Memorial hospital in New Orleans Louisiana when hurricane Katrina flooded the city and what ensued after like the levee system breaking and I’ll leave it there for you guys to pick up. They were stranded with no power and there were some decisions that had to be made by doctors that were between life and death. Being I work at a hospital this show absolutely had my attention from start to finish, it’s a mini series so I think like 8 episodes. Definitely recommend it.

[fleurdelouve]

[beakys-book-hoard]

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink My rating: 4 of 5 stars I like that you're given backgrounds to the people involved. Opposed to it being a cut and dry retelling of the events that happened. You get to learn about them and it helps cement that these are real people too. They're human. You also get to learn more about the history of the area and the change over time that ultimately effects what happens. It's an upsetting topic for sure. One you believe is preventable. All you can do is try. But sometimes things are unpredictable - people are unpredictable. And then you have the aftermath. You don't know what to do when you're in those situations. I definitely don't know what I'd do. I've never experienced anything like it. I hope I never have to. You can say, "Oh I'd do this or that," but would you really? Do I believe what was done was right? No. There were failures to the people from all aspects. But that doesn't mean what was done should be brushed off. The people involved in the decisions made and the ones who fulfilled the actions deserved some sort of punishment. They definitely shouldn't have had the ability to work in health care anymore. They made decisions on day one who they would prioritize and it was backwards. Though that's apparently what almost all the hospitals but one chose to do??? The blatant lies and misuse of supplies to make their time better (using the oxygen to cool themselves off instead of giving it to people who couldn't breathe) instead of using it to help the others was disgusting. When they were able to get some generators going again, instead of using it for medical equipment, they used it for fans. And then on the day that they all would've been rescued, they just killed them…..they took their possibility of being saved away so they could leave faster. It's disappointing, the lack of justice for the families.

[trendfilmsetter]

Apple TV’s FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL wins the Emmy for Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a Single Episode

[thebookbin]

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

Sheri Fink

Publisher: Crown Publishing (Penguin Random House) Genre: nonfiction, history, journalism Year: 2013

Wow, what a read.

As a Houstonian who lived through both Katrina and Harvey, the devastation of hurricanes and flooding is not lost on me. I spent days ruminating over this book, and I still feel conflicted about it. While the investigation and reporting of events inside the hospital are some of the most profound words journalism has ever produced, the Part II "aftermath" section is riddled with the author's biases, especially in a religious sense.

For those not in the know: this book follows the events at Memorial Baptist Hospital in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina, in which 45 people died at the hospital and where one doctor and two nurses were charged with accusations of euthanasia. While the investigation of what went on at Memorial is poignant and powerful, Fink's insistence on framing this entire debate on personal responsibility, while simultaneously letting a corporation she acknowledges as corrupt in passing off the hook is infuriating. Fink describes in detail and had access to Tenet's (the parent corporation of the hospital) emails where they actively chose not to send aid to the doctors at their own hospital, and yet focuses all her vitriol on the nurses and doctors trapped there with no water, no electricity, limited resources, and dying patients. This is where I believe Fink's personal religion colors this book to an unacceptable degree that makes this work unworthy of the Pulitzer Prize it won. Sheri Fink's disdain for certain topics shines through every snide remark disguised as journalism. She clearly does not agree philosophically with euthanasia. Fink is obviously religious, as she is incapable of removing her biases from her supposed "objective reporting" leads to targeted questions that clearly are intended to discredit the opinions she clearly disagrees with, "Could the societal embrace of suicide for terminally ill or disabled people lead to those groups feeling more worthless, devalued, and abandoned? Would it discount the meaning to be had from family reconnections, insights, forms of spiritual enrichment, and personal growth that may accompany death's approach?" This quote comes from a passage where Fink is discussing and "airing the debate" of assisted suicide. She seems to have no problems with Jehovah's Witnesses exorcising their rights to refuse treatment, but holds a palpable and sharp distaste for those who want the power to choose the time and place of their passing and be able to pass along painlessly. Even the veneer of her journalism can't hide her pompous disdain for the idea. While I personally don't know enough about medically assisted suicide to have an informed opinion, I have compassion for people who may be considering this route, and am curious enough about the debate to hear arguments and considerations from all sides. But Fink's biases are so strong I found myself siding in opposition to her, just to spite her obvious attempts to sway my opinion. Towards the end of the book it gets worse. She describes a doctor who went to jail for facilitating a physician assisted suicide of a terminally ill patient in the 90s, and then switches to the perspective of an investigator who, upon reading a newspaper "what she read, made her cry." She only shows the emotions of the people who's perspective she agrees with, and somehow that perspective never points any blame at any corporation, government, or system that failed and always on individual people's actions.

Fink also seems to completely disregard class consciousness until it serves her. She has no intellectual curiosity on how or why class affected Katrina outcomes, unless it's to be condescending to her target: Dr. Anna Pou. This ends up reading as absurd, when a billion dollar hospital group was responsible for lack of preparation before, ignoring federal regulations and warnings about their storm-readiness and Fink reports all of this like it's an afterthought. Ah yes, the entire system failed, the government failed to intervene and when they finally did their efforts were so disorganized they actively hindered rescue operations, but let's not look any closer there, we definitely can't investigate corporate malpractice, or even the possibility of personal responsibility for those in charge of the situation—no. We only care about personal responsibility of those not in charge. It's this hyper-individualistic stance that confirmed for me that this book is religious in nature. She hyper-fixates on Dr. Pou's wealth, while barely mentioning the two middle-class nurses charged alongside her unless it's a brief mention of how they struggled financially after their respective arrests. Fink seems desperate to frame this novel as taking down the Big Guy, but instead of doing the more interesting and admittedly harder work of investigating the Big Guy, she chooses a single doctor as the figurehead of the worlds problems and dresses her up as the boogeyman while allowing the actual menacing entity responsible for this tragedy continue to exist unexamined.

Overall, I would say my feelings towards this book are... conflicted. I do think that documenting what went on is important, as is the discussion of euthanasia, medical standards and how they might shift in disasters, and the philosophical and ethical questions of practicing medicine in extenuating circumstances. I just firmly believe this book fails to achieve that to any meaningful degree, and instead reads as a religious manifesto on the sanctity of life, an attempt to take on the Man that was misaimed in a way that lets actual corrupt power fester unchecked.

storygraph | bookshop.org | local houston

★★★ don't read this unless you want to be angry

[edsonlnoe]

TV Recap S22 | Series

THE WHITE LOTUS Season 2

THIS IS US Season 6

EUPHORIA Season 2

THE STAIRCASE Limited Series

STATION ELEVEN Limited Series

FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL Limited Series

THE HANDMAID’S TALE Season 5

UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN Limited Series

NEVER HAVE I EVER Season 3

ABBOTT ELEMENTARY Season 1

GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S CABINET OF CURIOSITIES Season 1

WEREWOLF BY NIGHT Special Presentation

HOW I MET YOUR FATHER Season 1

ACAPULCO Temporada 2

MOON KNIGHT Limited Series