Desk Jockeys No More
Anthony Campbell, RPh, DO, an internist and a pharmacist, and Joseph Matthews, RS, a sanitarian, were deployed together as part of a United States Public Health Service (USPHS) team. They landed in Louisiana to find their accommodations sufficient: a cot in one of five tents at Camp Allen that housed around 125 responders each. Both of these USPHS-commissioned officers had prior hospital-based practices in one of Washington, D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods. It was perhaps this recent experience that made them prime candidates to be plucked from desk jobs and jettisoned back into a stressed clinical milieu. While experience prepared them for the issues of indigence and poverty, it did not temper their reactions to the devastation and exposure to elements.
Their reunion made the task less challenging but the work they did was grueling. Dr. Campbell and Matthews traveled through parishes conducting needs assessments at Red Cross shelters in Washington Parish during the first week. The days were long—sometimes beginning at 5 a.m. and ending after 11 p.m.—and impossibly hot.
Both were impressed with people’s positive attitudes. Many shelters were overcrowded and lacked bathing facilities. Members of the community welcomed displaced people into their homes to shower and took turns preparing copious quantities of food. In a significantly overcrowded shelter, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) tried to move people to hotels; often, unrelated people who had been neighbors or who had weathered the storm together would refuse to go unless they could go together. A group of retirees from Maine who were visiting New Orleans, for example, insisted on staying together even if it was in the crowded shelter. This was an unanticipated dynamic.
Matthews talked about what he called, “the changing theater,” a military term that describes the need to change plans frequently when conditions of austerity dictate it. He indicates that many clinicians were unacquainted with the principle of gathering your assets and regrouping when plans take an about-face. That was the case throughout their deployment.
During the second week, Dr. Campbell moved closer to New Orleans, and Matthews went to the area’s largest animal shelter, a place with five huge barns, two filled with horses and three with smaller pets. In the chaos there, his main concern was not the lack of volunteers—they had plenty—but the frequent disregard for human health risks as they handled hungry pets that had been plucked from toxic floodwaters. The need to take universal precautions is not a universal belief. Just trying to get people to wear gloves was an ordeal. The volunteers were often unaware of their own cuts and bruises, and worked relentlessly.
Matthews laughed as he related a story of the volunteers’ compassion. It was late in the evening, and his transport had not arrived. Concerned, he called the base operation and learned that he’d been forgotten. He started to melt down with anger and fatigue. A group of volunteers quickly surrounded him with comfort and reassurance; they thought he was upset because he couldn’t find his pet! It restored his sense of humor and balance.
Meanwhile, Dr. Campbell was knocking on doors in a housing project, looking for people with health needs. Care was centrally located in Washington Parish, but lacking communication methods and transportation, many residents didn’t know about the help offered there. He relied on the project’s resident manager to help his team. The manager often knew who had been evacuated, how many children lived in units, and who was older and remained.
Dr. Campbell cites the heat and incredible stench as indelible memories. His deployment ended in New Orleans. Even in the French Quarter, which sits on higher ground, the air was thick with the smell of rotting food that had been removed from freezers to prevent it from ruining equipment. (Clark in Mississippi also mentioned the memorable foul odor of rotting food.) He understands now why police officers and forensics workers carry Vicks VapoRub to dab under their nose when they find a decomposed body.