Ativan

Ativan is a sedative whose appearances during the crisis at Memorial Medical Center place it at the uneasy boundary between comfort care and allegations of hastened death. It was given to Elaine Nelson after her daughter requested relief from her mother’s labored breathing; it was also among drugs retrieved for Merle Lagasse when her physician believed she was actively dying. Separately, a LifeCare nurse later recalled Anna Pou naming Ativan while describing a plan to administer lethal doses, though the nurse could not remember the full list. These accounts differ in who supplied the drug, what was known about its use, and how certain the record is about its effects.

Use for comfort and its perceived risk

During the evacuation crisis, Kathryn Nelson found her mother, Elaine, feverish and struggling to breathe. Elaine’s temperature was 106 degrees, her chest was congested, and a nurse was using a makeshift suction device—a plastic tube attached to a syringe—to clear secretions from her airway. Kathryn asked for medication to help her mother breathe more easily. The nurse agreed that Elaine seemed to need comfort and administered a small dose of Morphine and Ativan under orders an infectious-diseases doctor had left the previous Wednesday night for use if patients needed them.

The nurse then warned Kathryn that the drugs sometimes caused patients like her mother to stop breathing altogether. The warning transformed a request for relief into a night of vigilance: Kathryn stayed beside Elaine without sleeping. By morning, Elaine’s fever had broken; her color had improved, her eyes were open, and the nurse no longer heard congestion in her lungs. The account records these changes after the medication, but does not establish that Ativan caused them or identify its effect separately from Morphine and the other care Elaine received.

Medication retrieved for Merle Lagasse

At the garage, Merle Lagasse waited for rescue after days in the heat, separated from her daughter and suffering from advanced cancer and emphysema. A nurse noticed that she was gasping and asked her physician, Roy Culotta, to ease her breathing. Culotta believed Lagasse was in respiratory distress and actively dying, so he took her out of the evacuation line and asked an intensive-care nurse to retrieve painkillers and sedatives from the hospital.

The nurse returned with Morphine, Versed, and Ativan. Culotta had treated Lagasse with narcotics for weeks for cancer-related pain and anxiety and believed her tolerance was high. He thought a large amount of Morphine would relieve her gasping and suffering, while also believing it would hasten her death. He had considered her therapeutic options limited and pain and anxiety control central to her care. The nurse administered the drugs he ordered; Culotta took Lagasse back into the hospital and was with her when she died. The account identifies Ativan as one drug in the mixture, but does not specify its dose or isolate its contribution to either symptom relief or death.

A proposed dose for a staff member

Ativan also appears in a moment when LifeCare leaders were trying to leave the seventh floor. They intended to stop on Memorial’s second floor to check on Carrie Hall and other LifeCare patients, then continue through a hole in the machine-room wall toward the garage. They were carrying a dose of Ativan for a staff member they had heard was having a breakdown there. A Memorial employee blocked them from entering the second-floor patient area, where DNR patients were being kept.

The LifeCare group considered going in search of the patients but feared they might be shot or arrested. Only the LifeCare pharmacist was allowed onto the second floor, to proceed directly to the garage with the medicine. The episode places Ativan in an intended act of support for an overwhelmed worker, while also showing how restricted movement and confusion obstructed the staff’s efforts to reach both colleagues and patients. The account does not say whether the staff member received the dose.

An uncertain recollection and the limits of inference

In a later interview, Therese Mendez recalled asking Anna Pou about a decision to administer what Mendez understood as lethal doses. Mendez said Pou had listed drugs and repeated the list when asked, but Mendez could no longer remember exactly what had been named. She identified Morphine and Ativan, then explicitly qualified what followed as a guess. Her testimony therefore places Ativan in her recollection of the alleged plan, but also makes the limits of that recollection part of the evidence.

That uncertainty matters because the book also describes toxicology findings from bodies at Touro and Specialty Hospital of New Orleans: those tests reported high levels of Morphine and midazolam, not Ativan. The finding concerns other hospitals and a different drug combination; it does not establish Ativan’s presence in those bodies, or prove what happened at Memorial. Across the Memorial accounts, Ativan is documented in a small comfort-care dose for Elaine Nelson, listed among drugs brought for Lagasse, intended for a distressed staff member, and named in Mendez’s uncertain recollection. Those distinct circumstances resist treating the drug itself as a verdict: its mention does not, by itself, determine intention, dose, administration, or outcome.