“Mother Nature’s course would have to be hastened”

“Mother Nature’s course would have to be hastened” is a reported remark from the evacuation crisis at Memorial Medical Center, recalled by LifeCare nurse Cindy Chatelain and attributed by her to a doctor she believed was John Skinner. The words carry a grave implication: they can sound like a proposal to hasten patients’ deaths, not merely an acknowledgment that rescue was difficult. But the book preserves the remark as disputed testimony, not as an established statement by Skinner or proof of what happened to the patients.

Reported Words in the Evacuation Crisis

Chatelain said that on Thursday morning, while she was caring for the nine patients still on LifeCare’s seventh floor, a tall, thin, light-haired doctor arrived with a short, stocky man. According to her account, the doctor described the situation as grave and said there were no more resources to get the patients out. He called them “little people,” said they would not make it, and characterized them as Do Not Resuscitate patients. Chatelain corrected him: at least one patient was not DNR, but was extremely obese.

The doctor reportedly said helicopters could not carry that patient because of his weight. That explanation was not generally true. Some Acadian air-ambulance stretchers could bear only four hundred pounds, a little more than the patient weighed, but military aircraft could accommodate more. In Chatelain’s recollection, the doctor then said that only the strong could survive and that “Mother Nature’s course would have to be hastened.” The phrase thus emerged amid an argument about whether the remaining patients could be evacuated, including a correction to the doctor’s claims about one patient’s status and transportability.

A Disputed Attribution

Chatelain thought the doctor had identified himself as “Dr. Skinner with the CDC.” Skinner’s physical description fit the one she gave, and he chaired Memorial’s infection-control committee. But investigator Virginia Rider did not ask Skinner about the reported remark at the time, and it was not certain Chatelain had identified the right man.

Years later, Skinner said Chatelain was not referring to him. He did not remember speaking with a LifeCare nurse on the seventh floor or conveying such a message, and said the language did not sound like something he would have used. Rider also learned that Chatelain had a troubled history and had been placed on nursing-board probation shortly before the storm. These facts complicate the attribution; they do not, by themselves, settle whether the conversation occurred as she remembered it or who spoke the words.

The Weight of the Phrase

The phrase’s force depends on the difference between a patient being beyond the available means of rescue and a decision to hasten death. That distinction was especially consequential in a hospital where Memorial’s doctors had decided that patients with DNR orders would be evacuated last. A DNR order applied to resuscitation after breathing or heartbeat stopped; it was not itself an instruction to abandon a patient. One daughter, learning that her mother had been left behind because of her DNR status, said she had not understood it to mean “do not rescue” and asked for the order to be canceled.

Against that background, Chatelain’s account makes the language of natural selection sound less like neutral description than a possible justification for letting some patients die—or actively hastening their deaths. The distinction is an interpretive consequence of the reported words, not proof of the speaker’s intention. The account also includes a practical dispute over whether an obese patient could be transported, making the claim that there were no resources harder to treat as self-evident.

Memory and Uncertainty

Rider’s interviews with hospital workers yielded small but consequential inconsistencies: who had said what, which patients were DNR, and what could still be done to evacuate them. The investigation’s task, as the narrative presents it, was like assembling fragments of a broken mirror and trying to infer the image. The phrase remains one of those fragments—memorable for its implication, but unsettled in its authorship and evidentiary status.