John Russell

John Russell was an eighty-year-old LifeCare patient and Korean War veteran whose cardiac emergency during the loss of power at Memorial Medical Center became an account of both strenuous bedside care and the uncertainty left to his family after the storm. Gina Isbell hand-ventilated him as staff moved him through the hospital; when a physician said oxygen was no longer available, Isbell stopped and stayed with him as he died. His delayed identification and incomplete death records later left his widow searching for an explanation.

Identity and Circumstances

Russell’s account is grounded in his medical records and in recollections from his stepdaughter and the medical professionals involved in his care. Shortly before the hurricane, he had been seen by his family; a lawyer later described him as having appeared relatively well and lucid at that time. His history of cardiac disease made him medically vulnerable, but the account also preserves something more individual than a diagnosis: he was an older man who joked with the people looking after him.

The book follows him during a rapidly worsening hospital emergency rather than offering a broader biography. It records his age, military service, health circumstances, and family ties, then traces the efforts to keep him alive after the hospital’s power failed. That narrow focus matters: Russell is not presented merely as a name on a later list of deaths, but as a patient whom caregivers tried to resuscitate and accompany, and whose family was subsequently left without a clear account of what had happened.

Cardiac Emergency and Hand Ventilation

At about 5:30 in the morning, within hours of the backup power failure, Russell was found not breathing and without a heartbeat. Staff called a Code Blue, intubated him, and administered medication that restored a sustainable heart rhythm. They then carried him downstairs. The immediate crisis had been reversed, but the power failure meant that his breathing could not simply be maintained by the usual equipment.

On the second floor, LifeCare director of nursing Gina Isbell stood beside Russell and used an Ambu bag, squeezing air through a one-way valve into his breathing tube. Manual ventilation had been used in earlier disasters, but it could not regulate the volume and pressure of each breath as precisely as a machine. The account emphasizes the human labor behind this improvised support: Isbell continued until her hands tired, while Russell remained largely unresponsive and twitched, signs that he was not receiving enough oxygen to his brain despite her effort.

The wait in the hot corridor lasted nearly an hour. Russell was then moved on his stretcher toward the machine room and heliport. A physician checked his neurological response by shining a flashlight into his eyes and told Isbell, “You do know that he needs oxygen.” When she raised the problem, the physician said the hospital had no more oxygen and could not obtain any. His instruction was, “You have to let him go.” The exchange places the limits of the crisis in blunt terms: the need was recognized, but the resource required to meet it was unavailable.

Death and Immediate Aftermath

Isbell believed what she had been told. She stopped pumping the bag, stayed beside Russell, hugged him, and stroked his hair as he died. The account presents this as both the end of an attempted rescue and a final act of personal care. It does not describe Russell’s death as an abstract consequence of triage: a caregiver who had worked to sustain him remained with him when that effort could no longer continue.

Afterward, Isbell covered Russell with a sheet and rolled him out of the machine room. She waited near his feet for LifeCare nurse executive Therese Mendez to tell her where to take the body. The main morgue was on the eighth floor, no longer refrigerated, and possibly full. People passing through asked for the gurney. Their requests angered Isbell because she felt Russell deserved respect. The practical shortage of equipment thus continued into the handling of the dead, while the account records the strain it placed on a caregiver already responsible for a patient’s final moments.

Russell was the first patient placed in the chapel, where John Marse blessed him. That detail links the hospital’s improvised arrangements for the dead to a ritual of recognition: after a movement through corridors, a machine room, and a compromised morgue system, Russell was brought into a space where he received a blessing. It also marks how little ordinary infrastructure remained available to staff as they tried to care for patients who had died.

Family’s Search and the Meaning of the Record

Russell’s wife of forty-two years and their daughter did not learn the circumstances of his death from the hospital account. Nearly a year later, a lawyer for the family wrote to investigator Butch Schafer. The family had received a death certificate from the coroner’s office, but it gave no conclusive date or cause of death and was marked “pending investigation.” Because the family had not been told what had happened, that uncertainty left room for the fear that patients at Memorial had been injected. The book makes clear that this fear arose amid missing information; it does not present it as evidence about Russell’s death.

The delay was tangible. Russell’s widow took three weeks to locate his body and could not view it because its condition prevented that. The body was held for investigation and released to a funeral home well over two months after the storm. A DNA sample from his left tibia was taken to help confirm his identity, and distinctive skin marks were recorded. A skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his left arm bore the inscription “AS YOU ARE I WAS. AS I AM YOU WILL BE.” Its words, encountered in the account of identification, give the family’s search an unsettling material emblem: a statement about mortality attached to a body whose identity and circumstances still had to be established.

Russell’s wife imagined that he had suffered in the heat, unaware that he had died before the worst of the ordeal later described in the news. Schafer called the family’s attorney the day after receiving the letter and arranged to provide Russell’s medical records. The records could answer some questions about the course of his care, but the months of uncertainty had already become part of the family’s experience of the disaster. Russell’s narrative therefore moves from attempted resuscitation to the aftermath of incomplete communication: the hospital’s shortage constrained care in the moment, and the absence of a timely, clear account prolonged distress after his death.