Cathy Green

Cathy Green was a surgical intensive care nurse at Memorial Medical Center whose experience during Hurricane Katrina placed her at the intersection of bedside care, evacuation decisions, and the controversy that followed. She volunteered to help patients after her own ICU patients were no longer hers to treat, witnessed vulnerable people left without the support they needed, and later defended the colleagues accused in connection with deaths at the hospital. Her account and public advocacy reveal a nurse who understood care as more than preserving life at any cost: to her, easing suffering and recognizing a patient's dignity were also obligations.

Identity and Work at Memorial

Green worked in Memorial Medical Center’s surgical intensive care unit. During the crisis, she moved between the hospital’s second-floor lobby and its parking garage, caring for patients whose usual medicines, treatments, and familiar nurses had become separated from them. Her work was practical and immediate: offering water, improving a patient’s breathing, and trying to reassure someone who had been told that rescue would not come.

The hospital’s worsening circumstances are visible in Green’s reaction to the news that floodwater was advancing from Lake Pontchartrain. When a doctor told her that water had reached Claiborne Avenue, she grasped the distance—probably fifty city blocks from the lakefront—and understood the announcement as a sign of impending catastrophe. The water did not seem to her like a slow-moving stream. She compared its advance to footage of a tsunami, a wave that kept driving forward after breaking. She thought of the flood as a crisis sign, like the changes she watched for when an ICU patient was crashing. In that moment, she understood that the hospital had not escaped danger and that the situation had changed decisively.

Patients Left Waiting

After the evacuation had begun, Green volunteered to care for patients in the second-floor lobby. In the crowded room, patients lay in rows, looking markedly sicker without their medications, treatments, and regular nurses. Green waved a piece of cardboard to stir the stale air and offered them sips of water. When patients called for help, the scene overwhelmed her: even with her critical-care experience, she could not bear to stay and went up to the parking garage.

There, she found an elderly woman on the asphalt awaiting helicopter rescue. The woman was wheezing and distressed; Green heard fluid in her lungs and saw that the oxygen cylinder beside her was empty. She located a partly used tank, recruited others to help raise the woman into a more upright position, and started an inhalation treatment. She spoke softly to reassure her. These efforts were interrupted when a doctor examined the chart, noted the woman’s lung cancer, and indicated that she would not be evacuated. He ended further respiratory treatments; the cylinder, with its gauge showing about a quarter tank remaining, was to be the last.

Green felt numb. The decision not to evacuate the patient or continue supporting her with oxygen seemed personal, especially as Green worried about her own relatives in St. Bernard Parish, an area she had heard was among the first and worst hit by flooding. Her daughter, calling from another state, feared that something had happened to her grandmother. Green saw the woman as someone’s mother and grandmother, a person who mattered regardless of whether she had months or a year to live. Unable to watch her die on the ground in the parking garage while no one came to get her, Green stood and moved to another patient. She did not want to know the woman’s name.

Defense of Her Colleagues

When Cheri Landry and Lori Budo were arrested, Budo’s daughter called Green. Green was appalled and frightened for her friends. She rallied colleagues, arguing that the accusations struck at the integrity of everyone who had worked through the storm; she also challenged the contrast between the allegations and the shortage of rescue boats and helicopters during the crisis. She accompanied Budo on an errand to meet Budo’s lawyer, Eddie Castaing, and insisted that he understand whom he was representing. Green described Landry and Budo as exceptional nurses and said she would not live long enough to become as good a nurse as they were.

While many nurses avoided reporters, Green spoke publicly in support of the accused women. She said they were the best nurses available and that, if her daughter had needed care during the storm, she would have chosen them. Even if her daughter had died, Green said, she would not have blamed them for doing wrong. A support website organized by the nurses’ allies similarly presented the late and insufficient rescue effort—not the nurses—as the crime at Memorial, and called Landry and Budo battlefield heroes.

Green also helped turn expressions of support into practical aid. She solicited cards, letters, and words of encouragement for Landry and Budo, while colleagues sold bracelets and car magnets to raise money and organized food and other assistance. The nurses submitted budgets and received monthly help with bills, food, and clothing; the hospital’s medical staff gave each of them $10,000. Green saw the emotional cost of the arrests in the women’s fear and grief, and in the toll their situation took on their families. At a New Year’s Eve restaurant encounter, Horace Baltz told her he was disturbed by what her colleagues were accused of doing. Green immediately defended them: she was helping rally support and believed they had done the right thing.

Nearly two years after the storm, Green brought that defense to a public gathering at City Park. Wearing blue scrubs, she told supporters that the hospital’s rescue work was not finished: the storm had passed, but the work of seeking justice and exoneration for Anna Pou remained. She was among the speakers whose warnings addressed the grand jury and the possible effects of indicting medical professionals for their work during a disaster. Green’s public appearance made her more than a private supporter; she presented the case as one bearing on the whole hospital community.

Care, Suffering, and Professional Ethics

The grand jury’s decision not to indict pleased Green, but did not undo the public suspicion she believed Charles Foti had created about health-care workers harming patients. She remained proud of Memorial Medical Center and of the nursing and medical professions, and continued to believe in the colleagues whose conduct had been questioned. Her loyalty, however, was tied to a specific view of clinical care rather than to a simple rejection of difficult decisions.

Green did not believe in killing patients, but she also saw no virtue in withholding pain relief merely to prolong dying. In the ICU culture she knew, doctors such as Ewing Cook wrote orders that gave nurses considerable latitude with medications. After Memorial’s long closure led her to work in other hospitals, she noticed that patients there received less sedation. Her experience of watching patients’ breathing become sharply labored left her skeptical of reassurance that people in that condition could not feel discomfort. When a young doctor argued that reduced brain function meant patients were not suffering, Green challenged him to try breathing that way himself.

She also questioned the assumption that intensive care was always what patients wanted. Green had herself once been gravely ill on a ventilator, and understood how meaningful a nurse’s gentleness could be. At the same time, she believed that drugs and machines could keep some people alive through months of suffering, and that families seeking high-technology treatment might not recognize what that treatment could entail. In her view, the effects of ICU care on quality of life deserved consideration, particularly for elderly patients. She regarded death as not always the enemy and saw discussion of end-of-life care as the next struggle after her effort to defend her colleagues.

Green’s language about euthanasia showed how charged that struggle had become for her. She compared the fear surrounding the word to the racial charge of the word lynching, and wanted that fear to change. The comparison did not erase the distinction between easing suffering and intentionally causing death; rather, it expressed her belief that the controversy itself could prevent honest discussion of dying, pain relief, and the limits of treatment. Her enduring faith in her colleagues rested alongside a broader challenge to a medical culture that, in her view, could prolong suffering while avoiding its name.