Odun Arechaga

Odun Arechaga was a seventy-year-old patient at Touro Infirmary during Hurricane Katrina whose rescue became a revealing counterpoint to claims that critically ill patients had been left behind or given up on. Before the storm, he had suffered a heart attack, become unconscious, and sustained brain damage while rescuers struggled to find his home. Neurologists advised his daughter to let him die, but she refused. In the days before the hurricane, he began breathing on his own and became somewhat more responsive. During the evacuation crisis, he was found in grave condition at Touro and ultimately taken out by ambulance. His case records both the vulnerability of patients dependent on complex care and the consequences of treating a patient’s perceived criticality as a reason not to rescue him.

Illness and Refusal to Give Up

Arechaga’s crisis began before the hurricane reached New Orleans. After his heart attack, he fell unconscious and suffered brain damage as he waited for rescuers who were having difficulty locating his house. The neurologists’ recommendation to his daughter was stark: she should allow him to die. She did not accept that recommendation. Her refusal is a crucial part of his story, because the patient later found at Touro was not someone whose family had simply agreed that further care was unwanted.

In the days leading up to the storm, Arechaga’s condition changed. He regained the ability to breathe without assistance and became more responsive. The account does not suggest that he had recovered, or that his prognosis was certain; it establishes instead that he had shown signs of improvement after his daughter chose not to abandon hope. That distinction matters when his case is set against evacuation decisions made under extreme pressure. He remained critically ill, but his recent progress complicates any simple description of him as beyond help.

A Storyteller and Religious Founder

Arechaga’s life before the hospital crisis was marked by an unusual combination of religious leadership, imaginative performance, and fascination with disaster. In the 1960s, he founded the Sabaean Religious Order in Chicago, shaping its practices with ancient philosophies and mysteries. He described himself as a priest of the Am’n, the hidden and deep. These details locate him not only as a patient in a medical emergency but as a person with a distinctive intellectual and spiritual life.

His theatrical work gave that fascination a public form. Arechaga wrote and produced elaborate plays for his order’s holiday festivals, in which children reenacted the destruction of cities through Sumerian earthquakes and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. He was also remembered as a brilliant storyteller drawn to disasters. In her book Drawing Down the Moon, NPR reporter Margot Adler compared a Sabaean marriage feast she attended in 1975 with Fellini’s Satyricon; Arechaga playfully reminded her that the film was merely a movie. The surviving account thus presents him as a maker and teller of elaborate stories about catastrophe, before catastrophe became the circumstance in which others encountered him.

Found at Touro During the Evacuation

On Friday, September 2, witnesses found Arechaga on a gurney on Touro’s third floor, with his medical record nearby. He was in serious respiratory distress and required immediate attention. National Guardsmen wheeled him out of the hospital and called medical workers from a smaller hospital across the street. The rescuers treated his obstructed airway, replaced the tracheostomy collar, and prepared him for transport. As he was loaded into an ambulance, he opened his eyes. This is the last outcome the account establishes; it does not say what happened to him afterward.

The circumstances of his rescue belong to a wider failure of power and evacuation at Touro. Staff, uncertain how high and how quickly floodwaters would rise, had moved eighteen critical patients from the ground floor, which still had backup power, to the third floor, where the power had failed. The hospital’s generators were old in some cases, had not been tested for such prolonged operation, and were affected by potentially tainted fuel. They also could not support air-conditioning throughout the building, which depended on the impaired city water system. When ventilator batteries ran out, patients had to be ventilated by hand; many could not tolerate the change and died. Arechaga’s location on the third floor and his need for urgent respiratory care were therefore part of a building-wide emergency, not an isolated medical episode.

Allegations and the Limits of the Record

A Touro doctor writing anonymously to the attorney general’s office described being told by a military commander who supervised the evacuation that Arechaga was among fourteen patients considered too critical. The doctor alleged that medical workers had given those patients morphine and left them behind. This is an allegation reported through an anonymous account, not a direct description of the treatment rescuers gave Arechaga when they found him. The distinction is essential: the same record that reports the allegation also describes his discovery, treatment, and removal by ambulance.

Toxicology tests on some bodies found at Touro and at Specialty Hospital of New Orleans showed high levels of morphine and midazolam, the combination also used at Memorial. Those results give the broader investigation a concrete basis for examining medication practices, but the account does not identify Arechaga as one of the tested bodies or establish that he received either drug. His known fate in the narrative is rescue from Touro, not confirmation of death. The evidence therefore sustains a sharp contrast between the reported claim that he had been left behind and the witnessed account of his eventual removal, without resolving every question about what happened before rescuers reached him.

The Case in the Wider Hospital Crisis

Arechaga’s story appears alongside accounts from Memorial and Lindy Boggs, where evacuation and patient care were also under scrutiny. It helps make visible how institutional conditions and labels could converge: he was severely ill, depended on specialized respiratory care, and was reportedly classified as too critical to evacuate, yet rescuers found him alive and transported him for further care. His daughter’s earlier refusal to accept a recommendation to let him die gives that moment added weight, while his own later response to treatment is left open rather than turned into a promised recovery.

The book contrasts these hospital accounts with the response at public Charity Hospital. Charity had flooded and lost power, plumbing, computers, telephones, and elevators, and lacked a helipad or corporate overseers to assist. Its evacuation took until the afternoon of September 2, later than Memorial’s, and it had about twice as many patients across its two campuses with fewer staff per patient; nevertheless, fewer than ten patients died. That comparison does not determine what happened to Arechaga, but it places his rescue and the allegations surrounding Touro within a larger question: how hospitals made decisions about patients when power, transport, and time were failing. Arechaga’s episode preserves the difference between being judged unlikely to survive and being beyond rescue.