Carrie Mae Hall

Carrie Mae Hall, known as Ma’Dear to her large family, was a seventy-eight-year-old LifeCare patient with a tracheostomy. During the crisis at Memorial Medical Center, she actively sought care to help her breathe and was described as fiercely determined to survive. Later, Anna Pou wrote a prescription for a large amount of morphine for Hall. The account establishes the prescription, but does not state whether Hall received the medication or what ultimately happened to her.

Identity and Circumstances

Hall was among the LifeCare patients caught in the evacuation crisis. She had long, braided hair and a tracheostomy, and her family’s name for her, Ma’Dear, signals the place she held in a wide circle of relatives. In the staging area, she lay beside a Hibernia Bank ATM among some of the hospital’s sickest patients; most of those around her had been assigned triage category 3.

Seeking Care

Even as care was limited and some patients asked for medicines that physicians had decided not to provide, Hall reached out to a passing nurse to indicate that she needed the phlegm cleared from her tracheostomy. The nurse was surprised by how strongly she was fighting to stay alive. Using a portable machine, the nurse suctioned her airway and encouraged her to keep fighting. The episode presents Hall not simply as a patient being moved through an evacuation system, but as someone communicating a specific need and pressing for help.

The Morphine Prescription

In the subsequent medication sequence, Anna Pou wrote prescriptions for three patients lying in the second-floor lobby, one of them Hall. Pou ordered nine vials of concentrated intravenous morphine for each patient, totaling 90 milligrams per person, and wrote only as directed for how the drug should be given. She supplied her Drug Enforcement Agency number, authorizing her to prescribe controlled substances. The account compares the amount with the highest dose Pou had prescribed for pain in the preceding two days: 10 milligrams for a colleague’s patient with cancer who was already taking morphine and tolerant to its effects. That comparison makes Hall’s prescription part of the book’s examination of medication decisions under crisis conditions, while leaving the question of administration to Hall unresolved.

Narrative Significance

Hall’s brief appearance sets two facts beside one another without resolving the tension between them: she made a clear effort to obtain care and was described as determined to live; later, a physician prescribed a substantial amount of morphine for her. The nurse’s response to her request offers a concrete instance of care directed toward sustaining her in the moment. The prescription, by contrast, belongs to a contested sequence of decisions about medication and dying. The evidence provided does not establish Hall’s eventual outcome, whether the prescription was administered, or her understanding of it.