Five Nights At Hospital Analysis

Fink’s Five Nights at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital is a piece of realistic fiction that depicts both the events that took place in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at Memorial Hospital, formerly known as Baptist Hospital. In the hospital and its disastrous conditions, staff face difficulty in evacuating patients because of the lack of preparation and infrastructure for such a disaster. Ultimately, the doctors deem some patients unlikely to survive evacuation, particularly those with a Do Not Resuscitate order, who are injected with morphine and midazolam until they die. Fink presents the events through the perspectives of multiple witness as well as experts in the field of medicine, law and ethics. She develops the …show more content…
With both comparisons, Fink avoids a fallacious argument by using example that both share “properties that are important to the [her] claim”. (“Fallacies”) At Bellevue Hospital, after Superstorm Sandy, the staff faced a similar dilemma to those at Memorial as they had limited resources and failing power systems, with patients that were difficult to evacuate. One patient “weighed around six hundred pounds—much more than Emmett Everett at Memorial” and the other was weak “like patients at Memorial”. (Fink 476) By drawing this direct comparison between the situation at Memorial and at Bellevue, Fink presents the reader with an alternative response to a similar dilemma and allows them to question the response at Memorial. Additionally, she avoids a fallacious argument because the two situations are alike in the relevant aspects of being a disaster-response in a hospital with limited resources. Secondly, Fink presents a microcosm of the situation at Memorial in the evacuation of sick infants who needed an incubator. “Gershanik depended heavily on technology to keep his critically ill newborns alive. Transporting babies this sick without an incubator was unthinkable. And then it wasn’t. Plans had to be altered to fit reality” (Fink 92) Gershanik has limited resources and a fragile life in his hand, but he uses a hand pump to provide oxygen to one of the babies. Again, Fink avoids the fallacy of a weak argument through contrasting the two responses in their relevant properties. Doctors dealing with LifeCare patients ordered those that they felt they could not evacuate with morphine and midazolam, where when Gershanik is faced with a similar lack of resources, he hand-pumps the newborn to keep it alive. Fink suggests the possibility of another action at Memorial with this example. Overall