Linette Burgess Guidi - Mother and daughter relationship of Jannie Burgess

Linette Burgess Guidi and Jannie Burgess’s mother-daughter relationship is defined in the account by Linette’s visit to her mother in the ICU as Hurricane Katrina approached, followed by an anguished search after the evacuation. Jannie, a licensed practical nurse with advanced uterine cancer, was among the ICU patients designated for last-priority evacuation because she had a Do Not Resuscitate order. Linette learned only later that her mother had died during the evacuation, and remained uncertain about the circumstances of her death.

A nurse who became a patient

Jannie had entered nursing to support her children, after working as a taxi dispatcher and a secretary to a mortician. Her professional life carried a racial inequity: as a light-brown-skinned Black woman in mid-twentieth-century New Orleans, she could care for patients in many private hospitals but could not receive care in them. Born only months after Memorial Medical Center opened as Southern Baptist Hospital in 1926, she would wait more than four decades before she could be a patient there. By the time of the storm, she was in the ICU with advanced uterine cancer.

The visit and the evacuation

Linette came from the Netherlands to visit her mother in the ICU as the storm approached. The visit placed a family bond inside the hospital’s unfolding emergency: Jannie was one of four DNR patients in the ICU, and doctors had decided that patients with those orders would be evacuated last, despite the usual protocol’s priority for the sickest patients and those dependent on machines. The evidence records Jannie’s classification and Linette’s presence, but does not establish what Linette knew about the evacuation decision at the time.

Searching after the storm

After the evacuation, Linette searched online for news of her mother. She and a caring niece enlisted relatives in Louisiana, Chicago, the Netherlands, and Italy to make calls and check missing-person listings. The effort stretched across countries and family networks, but Linette received the news only many days later, by email: Jannie had died during the evacuation.

Delayed knowledge and unresolved questions

Images of Memorial Medical Center on CNN brought the hospital back into view for Linette. She reacted with distress and could not bear to hear more; she also refused to believe that her mother had been among the patients injected. The account does not resolve that uncertainty for her. Their relationship therefore appears through both concrete acts of connection—Linette’s journey to the ICU and her subsequent search—and the painful gap between Jannie’s death and the information reaching her daughter.