Anna Pou—Kathleen Fournier

Anna Pou and Kathleen Fournier were colleagues at Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina, often working alongside one another as the hospital struggled to care for patients. Their relationship carries particular significance because Fournier voiced ethical dissent during a discussion about medication, at a moment when clinical work, comfort care, and the possibility of hastening death had become difficult to separate. The surviving account shows a working association and a serious difference of view, but does not establish a personal feud or describe Pou’s response to Fournier’s objection.

Colleagues in a Hospital Under Strain

Fournier did not have a medical practice of her own. Richard Deichmann paid her a flat fee to cover his internal medicine group’s inpatients at Memorial Medical Center and LifeCare Hospitals when his group took weekend call. Although it was not her scheduled turn, she agreed to work during the hurricane because the physician who had been scheduled wanted to hold a birthday party for his daughter. Deichmann later suggested that she leave after the storm passed, but Fournier stayed and worked hard, often alongside Anna Pou.

Her work unfolded in conditions that made ordinary care laborious. On the morning of the medication discussion, Fournier had sprawled on the second-floor lobby carpet in front of a box fan powered by an overloaded generator. Long extension cords and heavy electrical loads repeatedly tripped its breaker, sending someone to the parking garage to reset it. The doctors meeting in the radiology room decided to try to persuade her to leave when transportation became available. A colleague went to encourage her, judged that she seemed fine, and did not press the matter. The scene places Pou and Fournier within the same strained clinical environment, but also shows Fournier as one of the staff who continued working in it.

The Medication Discussion

Fournier was present when Susan Mulderick spoke with Pou about giving medication to patients. She objected plainly: “I just disagree with this.” Mulderick answered that Fournier need not order or administer anything if she did not want to: “OK, don’t order it,” she said. “Don’t give it. I’m just asking. If you don’t want to give it, don’t worry about it.” The exchange records Fournier’s disagreement and Mulderick’s response; it does not report that Pou joined the dispute or that Fournier addressed her directly.

The context matters. Pou had written prescriptions for three patients: Wilmer Cooley, an eighty-two-year-old LifeCare patient with heart problems, a serious infection, and a need for dialysis; Carrie Mae Hall, a LifeCare patient with a tracheostomy; and Donna Cotham, a forty-one-year-old Memorial patient with liver disease whose condition had worsened. A pharmacist filled the prescriptions. Fournier’s objection is reported in the account of the conversation about medication, but the evidence does not identify her as the prescriber of those orders or specify that she challenged each prescription individually.

Later, Mulderick described her own proposal as an effort to provide comfort, giving Ativan as an example of medication to help patients relax. The prescriptions collected during the investigation showed that Pou and other doctors had already prescribed Ativan and other ordinary comfort medications during the disaster. That later evidence complicates the apparent novelty of the proposal, but does not erase the importance of Fournier’s objection: she had heard the discussion as raising the possibility of putting patients “to sleep or out of their misery,” and she chose to say that she disagreed.

Fournier’s Ethical Concerns

Fournier’s dissent was consistent with the position she expressed to Fran Butler, a nurse manager, when she asked about talk of putting patients to sleep or out of their misery. Butler replied, “That is not an option.” She said she increased morphine only when a patient appeared uncomfortable and believed staff should remain on their wards and maintain care while conditions persisted. The account presents Butler’s view as her own; it does not say that Fournier and Butler agreed on every aspect of care. It does, however, show Fournier seeking another clinician’s perspective rather than keeping her concern to herself.

The disagreement also took place against a backdrop of severe fatigue and practical difficulty, not in an abstract ethics debate. Fournier had stayed after being advised that she could leave, worked in the overheated hospital, and was among the doctors who had labored through the crisis. At one point she wore a large patch over an irritated eye, held in place with ragged tape that was losing its grip in the humidity. These details do not explain her objection, but they locate it within the same embodied emergency in which she and Pou were caring for patients under pressure.

The Meaning and Limits of the Record

Fournier was sometimes perceived by nurses as aggravating: she spoke up loudly when upset, used colorful language, and did not filter her comments. That description helps explain why her objection was conspicuous, but it should not be mistaken for evidence of a particular conflict with Pou. The clearest account makes Fournier a witness to Mulderick’s discussion with Pou and records Fournier’s disagreement with the proposal as she understood it. It leaves Pou’s reaction, and the precise terms of any later conversation between the two doctors, unreported.

Their collegial relationship therefore serves as a point of ethical contrast within the hospital rather than a fully narrated interpersonal rupture. Pou was involved in prescribing medications for patients; Fournier, who had worked alongside her, objected when she heard medication discussed in terms that suggested hastening death. The book’s account preserves both the gravity of that intervention and the limits of what can be concluded about the two women’s relationship: it documents shared work and a moment of dissent, not a settled judgment about either doctor’s motives or a personal break between them.