Ambu bags

Ambu bags became a vital but imperfect substitute for mechanical ventilation during the power crisis at Memorial Medical Center. In darkened corridors and on a narrow staircase, staff squeezed the bags to keep ventilator-dependent patients breathing as they moved toward possible rescue. The device made continued care possible, but its effectiveness depended on exhausted people sustaining the work by hand.

Function During the Power Crisis

On the seventh floor, LifeCare Hospitals of New Orleans staff were carrying ventilator-dependent patients toward the stairwell after word came that the United States Coast Guard had returned to the hospital’s heliport and could evacuate patients brought there immediately. Nurses used football-shaped Ambu bags to provide breaths while the patients were moved. Instead of relying on a functioning ventilator, they had to keep pressing the bags as part of the effort to maintain each patient’s breathing.

The bags were part of a larger, labor-intensive transfer. Staff rolled patients onto their sides and then onto stiff spine boards, placed the boards on stretchers, and wheeled them through the corridors to the stairwell. There, volunteers lifted each board, negotiated the turns and landings, and carried the patient down five stories toward the second-floor lobby and the power plant. Someone continued pumping oxygen into the patient’s lungs while others worked to keep the breathing tube in place. The equipment did not make the descent safe or easy; it made it possible to continue providing breaths during it.

Manual Ventilation on the Staircase

Karen Wynn and Thao Lam joined the effort with flashlights. Lam held the front of a spine board and lit the route; Wynn carried the back end and also managed her flashlight. Two or three volunteers stood at each side. At each landing, the group raised the board above the handrails and rotated it to line up with the next flight. The patient’s breathing support had to continue through these repeated lifts and turns, linking the work of moving the body to the work of keeping air passing through the breathing tube.

The scene shows the bags operating as practical emergency equipment, not as a simple replacement for a ventilator. Their use required a person to keep squeezing while the patient was carried, and the effort had to be coordinated with the volunteers supporting the board and protecting the airway. The improvised chain of care stretched from the patient’s bed, through the stairwell, and toward the heliport. The bags offered a way to sustain that chain when normal power and equipment were no longer dependable.

John Russell and the Limits of the Device

The manual ventilation effort extended beyond the seventh-floor evacuation. John Russell, an eighty-year-old LifeCare patient and Korean War veteran being treated for a serious skin infection, was found without breathing or a heartbeat at about five thirty in the morning, within hours of the backup power failure. Staff called a Code Blue, intubated him, and administered drugs that restored a heart rhythm they considered livable. He was then carried downstairs, where Gina Isbell, LifeCare’s director of nursing, used a reinflatable Ambu bag to send air through his breathing tube.

Manual ventilation had been used in earlier disasters for hours, including by Juan Jorge Gershanik while caring for a newborn on a helicopter. But a hand-operated bag could not deliver breaths as precisely in volume or pressure as a machine. The account therefore distinguishes the act of keeping a patient ventilated from the ability to reproduce mechanical ventilation reliably: the bag provided support, while its limitations could make that support less effective.

Isbell continued pumping as Russell waited in a hot corridor. He was twitching and largely unresponsive, signs that, despite her efforts, he was not receiving enough oxygen to his brain. Nearly an hour passed before he was moved farther along, into the machine room on the way to the heliport. A physician checked his eyes with a flashlight and told Isbell that Russell needed oxygen. When the physician said no more oxygen was available, Isbell stopped pumping. She stayed beside Russell, embraced him, and stroked his hair as he died. The scene makes the bag’s limit stark: it could deliver breaths only while staff had the strength and resources to continue, and it could not overcome the lack of oxygen described in the account.

Exhaustion, Care, and Significance

The bag’s physical operation placed sustained responsibility on whoever held it. Isbell’s hands grew tired during her work with Russell, and her effort continued in a corridor while staff waited to move him. Earlier, Anna Pou had also taken a turn squeezing a reinflatable Ambu bag for a LifeCare patient on the second floor, switching off with a nurse and another staff member. When Pou returned to relieve one of them, the patient had died. The episode records both the shared labor of manual ventilation and its uncertain outcome: taking a turn at the bag did not guarantee that a patient would survive.

Across these scenes, Ambu bags mark the gap between having a means to provide some respiratory support and having the personnel, oxygen, power, and time to sustain care. During the stairwell transfer, they accompanied a coordinated rescue effort; in Russell’s case, hand ventilation continued through a long wait but ended when staff were told there was no more oxygen. Their significance lies in that double role. They were immediately useful tools in an emergency, yet their use exposed how fragile care became when a machine-supported system depended on repeated human effort under crisis conditions.