Mark LeBlanc—Vera LeBlanc

Mark LeBlanc—Vera LeBlanc is a mother-son relationship tested by the breakdown of hospital evacuation during Hurricane Katrina. Mark’s familiarity with the hospital, his search for a way back into the flooded city, and his decision to carry his mother out of Memorial Medical Center turn family care into a direct challenge to the evacuation order imposed on her by her DNR status. The account establishes her boarding an airboat, but does not trace her subsequent condition or destination.

Family Ties to the Hospital

Mark’s connection to Memorial began before the crisis: he had been born there when it was known as Baptist, and his family had long gone there for medical care. He had visited Vera only days before the flood. She was then an eighty-two-year-old LifeCare patient, with a sitter, inside a hospital he knew as a family institution as well as a place of treatment.

That personal history made the evacuation failure immediate and legible to him. After Mark and Sandra had evacuated from New Orleans and taken shelter with a relative in northern Louisiana, they learned that the city had flooded. They set out to reach Vera, first stopping in Baton Rouge to collect volunteer identification badges. Their return was not simply a trip toward a familiar address: the roads and usual systems of access had been disrupted, and they needed a route into a city surrounded by floodwater.

Finding a Way to Vera

At an emergency-services staging point, Mark’s knowledge of the hospital became practical. When two airboat captains asked whether the couple knew how to reach Memorial, he could guide them: he had been born there and had visited Vera there days earlier. The group launched near Ochsner Medical Center and followed a route that Mark and Sandra had taken in reverse when leaving the city. The airboats carried them along the flooded highway toward the hospital.

Mark went up seven flights of stairs to LifeCare. He found Vera lying on a wet bed, covered in sweat, and asking for water. She described her situation calmly as a mess. Mark was angry at what he saw, but his response was concrete: he and Sandra comforted her, then sought information and assistance from Diane Robichaux, LifeCare’s senior leader on the floor. They explained that they had brought boats and could help move patients, while Sandra pointed out that ambulances would be needed at the boat landing. Robichaux said the hospital had lost its means of contacting its corporate office and accepted their offer to seek help themselves.

Mark also tried to secure treatment for Vera. He believed she needed intravenous fluids for hydration and antibiotics for a persistent urinary infection. He was told the hospital could no longer provide IV fluids. Although Vera was a LifeCare patient, he raised the issue with a Memorial administrator, who explained that the hospital had shifted from treating patients to operating in survival mode. His challenge was not abstract: the decision meant that a patient he had come to rescue could not receive the care he thought she needed while waiting to leave.

The DNR Classification

The evacuation system turned Vera’s old medical instruction into a barrier to rescue. Memorial staff sorted patients into three groups: those in comparatively good health who could sit or walk, those needing more assistance, and the sickest patients, who were to go last. The last group also included patients with DNR orders. Vera was among those waiting near the rear of the line, though her order had been made more than a decade earlier to prevent restarting her heart if it stopped. Her heart was still beating; the order did not mean that she had asked to be left behind during an evacuation.

That distinction matters to the relationship’s course. A DNR order concerned resuscitation after a patient’s breathing or heartbeat stopped, while the hospital’s evacuation decision used the label to rank patients for removal. Mark and Sandra had been told Vera would leave by helicopter, and they wrote family names and telephone numbers on her hospital gown in anticipation. Instead, she remained in the second-floor lobby, near an ATM and a planter, with other DNR patients. The mismatch between the promised evacuation and her actual place in the queue transformed Mark’s concern into a decision to act without waiting for the system to resolve her status.

Carrying Her Out

By late afternoon on Wednesday, August 31, few patients had left Memorial: helicopters had arrived only rarely, and ambulances had not reached the airboat drop-off. Mark found Vera again and, with Sandra, decided that another night in the hospital was unacceptable. They had limited fuel, and the boat pilots did not expect to return the next day, even though many people remained inside. When staff had earlier tried to prevent them from entering the patient-care area, Mark had warned that they could take their boats away as well as bring them.

The couple chose to carry Vera downstairs to one of the boats. Her cot bent as they lifted it, and several doctors told them they could not take her. Sandra answered that they would proceed and told the doctors they could assist or move aside. With two volunteers’ help, Mark and Sandra carried Vera to the ambulance ramp, where a pane of Plexiglas had been removed to permit access to the boats. Vera boarded wearing earmuffs and spoke animatedly about being on a boat. Before leaving, Sandra also helped a hospital security guard onto the vessel after he said he was desperate to leave.

The rescue resolves the immediate contest over whether Vera would remain inside or be moved out: the son who had crossed back into the flooded city helped carry his mother to an airboat. It does not establish what happened to her after departure. In the book’s wider account, that action stands against an evacuation process that treated a longstanding DNR instruction as a reason to delay someone who remained alive and needed assistance.