She found value even in Wilda's less active life. But the role Angela McManus had chosen was not to preside over her mother's dying process. She also agreed that if her mother's heart or lungs shut down there was no sense in trying to revive her with breathing tubes, electric shocks, or chest compressions - interventions that would have no effect on chronic, underlying health problems. Carefully counseled by the infectious diseases specialist on duty the day Katrina hit and Wilda's infection worsened, Angela had opted against surgical intervention in an operating room on backup power. Though it was difficult for Angela McManus to accept that death might come soon for seventy-year-old Wilda, she was not unreasonable about this. Sheri Fink's first book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival followed medical professionals under siege during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Tending to her mother and ensuring her dignity was her life's current purpose. She had not put limits on her sacrifices. A note in her hospital admission paperwork said "daughter stays with patient at all times." Angela had quit her job and spent more than a year as her care-giver. Wilda could still smile sweetly but couldn't always make herself understood due to a stroke and the brain-muddying effects of certain medicines. Wilda had been the longtime patient information manager at Charity Hospital, the first person visitors would see when they walked beneath an ornate metallic screen through that hospital's Art Deco entranceway. All day she had waited, Angela by her side, asking in vain for a doctor to rescind her mother's DNR order.Īngela served as the voice and advocate for her mother. Late Wednesday morning, she'd been "en route," according to a note in her medical chart, "to the heliport." She had never even made it off the floor. McManus was lying on a bed by a doorway near the nurse's station, uncharacteristically alone. Her daughter Angela had made sure of that because Wilda had once had a bad reaction to the drug, growing more agitated instead of calmer. Just before midnight, a nurse pushed a dose of the sedative drug Ativan through a syringe into LifeCare patient Wilda McManus's IV line. Staff members, convinced the hospital had been broken into, blockaded the stairwells for the night. One story below Wynn, in LifeCare, shattered windows also opened onto the stage of the shattered city, echoing with gunshots, shouts, and blaring car alarms. Thoughts of her sleeping daughter uprooted the feeling. They were never going to get out of Memorial. When she returned to her pallet, Wynn had the sense the fearful woman was right.
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