Order to Cease Care for Second-Floor Patients

The Order to Cease Care for Second-Floor Patients was a directive given during the unfolding crisis at Memorial Medical Center: a physician told nurses to stop what they were doing and cease all care for the patients. Its significance lies in the stark change it imposed on bedside work. A young nurse who had returned to the floor found patients still in distress; the same physician then asked her to help move the dead to the chapel.

Crisis on the Second Floor

The order came amid a broader emergency in which staff faced floodwaters and the prospect of losing power. At an improvised command meeting, Susan Mulderick had stressed the need to act quickly and had proposed evacuating the patients most dependent on life support first. But the cease-care directive described on the second floor was not simply an evacuation ranking: it instructed staff to stop providing care to the patients there.

The episode also sits beside a separate decision to place patients with Do Not Resuscitate orders last in the evacuation sequence. A DNR order meant that a patient whose heartbeat or breathing had stopped should not be revived; it was distinct from a living will and did not, by itself, mean that all care should cease. The reported second-floor directive was broader in its wording, and the account does not establish that it was based on the patients’ DNR status.

A Nurse Returns to the Lobby

The young nurse had earlier been told to pack her belongings and leave. About an hour later, she returned to the second-floor lobby and noticed that one patient looked unusually pale. A colleague checked the patient with a battery-powered pulse oximeter; the reading was around 65 percent. Looking across the lobby, the nurse saw that several other patients did not appear well either.

The physician who had told her to leave now instructed her and the other nurses to stop their work and cease all care. The young nurse saw staff covering patients with sheets. She was twenty-two and only three months out of nursing school, and had never seen a patient die. The physician then asked her to help carry the dead patients to the chapel, where they were placed. The nurse began assisting.

Conflict, Authority, and Aftermath

The order did not erase the differences among staff over what remained possible or right. Some nurses who knew the patients believed that, after surviving the storm’s earlier ordeals, they might still reach safety. Others on the second floor regarded the medication decisions and what followed as horrible but necessary. In another effort to preserve a chance of survival, nurses carried a man who was still struggling to breathe toward the parking garage, hoping to get him quickly to the helipad.

The scene exposes a fracture between the directive to stop care and the continuing judgments of individual caregivers. The young nurse’s return, her observation of the patients, and her subsequent assignment to help move the dead make her both witness to the order’s consequences and a participant in what followed. The account identifies the issuing physician through the nurse’s recollection but does not name her in this passage, nor does it describe a formal written order or give a reason for the directive.