Karen Lagasse—Merle Lagasse

Karen Lagasse—Merle Lagasse is a mother-daughter bond rendered through practical, sustained care: Karen accompanies Merle through chronic illness, monitors the equipment that supports her breathing, and tries to remain with her during the chaotic evacuation of Memorial Medical Center. Their story moves from the rhythms of Merle’s life at home to a crisis in which Karen must argue for her mother’s immediate needs while decisions about transport repeatedly take control out of her hands.

A life beyond illness

Until the months before the storm, Merle was a vivacious seventy-six-year-old. She had volunteered in schools, worked reception at a beauty salon, and devoted herself to feral cats as a lover, rescuer, and collector. These details matter to the relationship: Karen’s mother is not introduced only as a patient, but as someone with a history of work, service, affection, and independent interests.

Merle’s emphysema had increasingly shaped the family’s routines. Her physician, Ewing Cook, had treated her until his recent retirement. Merle took care with her appearance for appointments, and Cook greeted her warmly. He also made a joking remark about her eventual death that irritated Karen, although Merle heard the compliment in it. The difference in their reactions gives a brief glimpse of how each daughter and mother met the illness: Karen registered the harshness of the joke, while Merle held onto its affectionate surface.

Care at home and in the hospital

Cook had been frank that there was little to be done for Merle’s emphysema. He prescribed home oxygen, and Merle chose a long cord so she could move more freely around the house; she sometimes went out with a portable tank. Karen, however, wished that more might be tried, including physical therapy. Their differing positions do not amount to a break between them: they show Karen looking for ways to preserve her mother’s mobility even as the illness restricted it.

Another doctor, Roy Culotta, proposed a thoracentesis to remove fluid that was constricting one of Merle’s lungs. The procedure might provide temporary relief, perhaps for days or weeks, before the fluid accumulated again. Culotta ordered a kit to be kept at Merle’s bedside, but did not perform the procedure before the hurricane. After speaking to Karen in the parking garage on Monday, he said he was going home to shower; the kit remained unopened beside Merle. For Karen, that unrealized treatment became one more part of the care plan left suspended as the hospital’s ordinary routines fell apart.

When the air-conditioning failed, Karen moved a box fan to her mother’s bedside and used ice packs to keep her cool. She also went to pray in Memorial’s dark, empty chapel for Merle and for the cats left at Merle’s home with food and water, whom she feared might have drowned. The episode places Karen’s care across two settings at once: she stayed attentive to her mother in the hospital while worrying about the animals and home life that Merle could no longer tend herself.

A changing evacuation plan

On Tuesday night, the alarm on Merle’s high-flow oxygen machine sounded. The respiratory therapist had stopped visiting, and Karen felt that it took the nurses a long time to identify the problem: the power loss. Staff replaced the machine with a less effective mask connected to the hospital’s bulk oxygen supply, which was still flowing through the wall. Karen thought her mother’s breathing looked more laborious and tried to cool her by fanning her with a piece of cardboard bearing the hospital company’s logo.

At first, nurses told Karen that Merle would be among the first patients evacuated because she depended on equipment to breathe. That expectation changed when a doctor asked whether she could sit in a wheelchair. Karen said she did not think Merle could. As patients able to walk or sit in wheelchairs began leaving first, Karen recognized that the earlier assurance no longer described the plan. Her mother’s need for oxygen did not guarantee that she would be moved first; it made her harder to transport.

When Merle’s turn came, a nurse transferred her oxygen tubing from the wall to a regulator on a green metal cylinder. Karen noticed that the thoracentesis kit was still beside the bed and asked whether it should go with them. The nurse told her the procedure would not be done. Volunteers then lifted Merle on her bed sheets and carried her toward the stairwell. They initially turned her headfirst down the stairs, but backed up and changed direction so she could be carried feet-first.

Two flights below, Merle was placed in a line of patients near the second-floor machine room. Lying flat made breathing more difficult. A nurse came to check on her and increased the oxygen flow; Karen’s response was that Merle needed to leave immediately. The sequence made the conflict between transport and bedside care concrete: the evacuation was moving Merle toward rescue, but each stage also exposed how dependent she was on equipment and on someone noticing when that support failed.

Separation and advocacy

As staff prepared to move Merle toward the heliport, Karen was told to leave the area. She started away, then heard her mother call that she could not breathe. Karen turned back and saw that the oxygen tank had been disconnected as Merle was about to be passed through a narrow opening in the wall leading to the parking garage. She urgently told a woman in scrubs, who appeared to be in charge, that her mother could not breathe without the oxygen and needed it reconnected. The woman replied that Karen did not know what was happening; others watched as Karen argued. Staff assured her that Merle would receive oxygen on the other side of the opening, but again told her to leave.

Karen understood that she had to get out of the area, and that Merle had to continue toward evacuation. She went down to the emergency-room ramp to try to board a boat, hoping to search for wherever her mother might be taken. Her immediate objective had shifted from accompanying Merle through the hospital to finding her after the separation. The account does not establish what happened to them after Karen left the ramp; it ends with her effort to locate her mother and her insistence that Merle should not be alone.

The relationship’s defining action is not a single declaration but Karen’s repeated attention to the particulars of Merle’s care: the oxygen machine, the wall supply, the cylinder, the bedside procedure kit, and the route out of the building. The evacuation converted those practical acts of caregiving into advocacy under pressure. Karen could not control the changing order of transport or remain beside her mother throughout it, but she continued to identify what Merle needed and to seek a way to be with her.