Anna Maria Pou

Anna Maria Pou was a physician at Memorial Medical Center during the Hurricane Katrina crisis and, afterward, one of the doctors at the center of an investigation into whether patients’ deaths had been hastened. The available accounts place her in the darkened hospital during its evacuation and connect her to morphine prescriptions for a cancer patient who survived the ordeal. Her story is also inseparable from the book’s account of how uncertain memories, medical records, and later investigations were assembled into competing interpretations of what happened.

Identity and Crisis Setting

Pou practiced medicine at Memorial Medical Center as the hospital faced deteriorating conditions and attempted to evacuate its patients. The book’s account of her work draws on interviews with Pou and other hospital staff, as well as records made during and after the crisis. One description of the scene was based in part on Pou’s own account: she recalled changing into clean scrubs and finding ways to move through the darkened hospital. The scene was not presented as the recollection of a single observer alone; the author also relied on accounts from multiple staff members and investigators.

That layered sourcing matters to Pou’s portrayal. She appears both as a participant in urgent care and as a person whose actions became subject to retrospective scrutiny. Her own account could provide details of what she remembered doing, but it was only one part of a broader reconstruction, alongside pharmacy records, interviews, and observations recorded by others. The book’s method does not make those sources interchangeable: an individual recollection, a contemporaneous record, and an investigator’s later interpretation each have different limits.

Medical Actions and the Morphine Records

A nurse later described Pou giving morphine to a patient during the hospital crisis. The nurse did not recall the patient’s name, but her description was consistent with pharmacy records documenting individual morphine doses of between two and ten milligrams for a cancer patient of a colleague whom Pou was covering on Wednesday and Thursday. The patient survived the ordeal at Memorial and later died; the author did not identify her, noting that the family had not been contacted. The account therefore establishes a particular episode of medication and a survival outcome, while leaving the patient’s identity outside the published narrative.

Separate pharmacy records concerned prescriptions for morphine that Pou had ordered. The pharmacist initially said he could not remember being asked for large quantities. After reviewing the drug-inventory logs, however, he confirmed that he had filled the prescriptions. He thought two young female doctors had come to obtain the medication and understood that the quantity might have been intended for travel with patients. His recollection did not independently settle the purpose of the drugs; the recorded dispensing and his explanation remain distinct pieces of evidence. Read together, they show why the investigation turned not only on what medication was present, but on who requested it, in what amounts, and for what anticipated use.

Witnesses, Records, and Disputed Reconstruction

Other evidence placed Pou on Memorial’s seventh floor after a group of LifeCare staff had left. The hospital pathologist and his laboratory director had been asked to keep track of deaths and, on Thursday afternoon, walked through the building to record the dead and their locations. Their notes and later recollections became important to reconstructing when deaths occurred. On the seventh floor, they encountered Pou and a nurse manager beside an unconscious woman who was breathing intermittently and with difficulty. The investigators did not identify the woman; the author considered that she was likely Wilda McManus based on the description and location, an inference rather than a confirmed identification.

The book also stresses how testimony could be affected by the passage of time and by exposure to other accounts. Investigators worried that news reports might prompt genuine memories, but might also shape or contaminate recollections. Several LifeCare witnesses had discussed their experiences and worked from a written timeline after the evacuation. This concern did not, by itself, establish that any witness was mistaken or that Pou’s account was unreliable. It explains why investigators sought additional interviews, avoided leading questions, and looked for physical and written records from the time. Pou’s actions were thus narrated within a larger evidentiary problem: how to establish a sequence of events when witnesses remembered different parts of a shared emergency.

Investigation and Narrative Significance

Pou’s relationship to the investigation became explicit when she submitted an affidavit and appeared in a court proceeding in January 2006. According to the cited affidavit and hearing transcript, she had left messages on the hospital executive’s cell phone and wanted to obtain her own lawyer before answering questions. That account documents her response to the inquiry at that stage; it does not, on its own, resolve the underlying allegations.

The book’s account of Pou remains shaped by its stated reporting limits. Its author says she was not present at the hospital, began researching in February 2007, and conducted more than five hundred interviews with people connected to the crisis and its aftermath. The author also explains that dialogue in quotation marks was reproduced from remembered interviews or primary sources, and that efforts to contact participants could not always reconcile conflicting memories. For Pou, this method gives the reader both specific anchors—the medication logs, the nurse’s account, the pathologist’s observations, and the affidavit—and clear boundaries around what those anchors can prove. Her significance in the narrative lies not only in the clinical decisions attributed to her, but in the unresolved distance between emergency action and the later effort to determine its meaning.