Cindy Chatelain

Cindy Chatelain was a registered nurse whose work during the Katrina crisis at Memorial Medical Center is recorded in the care of patients awaiting evacuation. Her notes describe a hospital without air, lights, water, or toilet facilities; other records document her administration of medication to patients in distress. The book’s account follows these clinical details into a painful aftermath, while distinguishing what is documented from her family’s explanation of the personal toll.

Identity and Documentary Record

The book identifies Chatelain as a registered nurse among the LifeCare nurses and therapists. Its account of her includes a Louisiana State Board of Nursing consent order dated August 16, 2005, a May 2005 employee background report, and interviews with her husband, Alfred Lee Moses, and daughter, Catherine Chatelain. The record establishes that these documents existed, but does not specify their contents or make them an explanation for her later loss of her license.

That documentary framing matters because the account of Chatelain is assembled from clinical notes and family recollections rather than from an extended first-person narrative. Her own charting fixes the conditions in which she was working; her family’s later testimony describes consequences they associated with the experience. Those sources illuminate different parts of her story and do not, by themselves, establish a single medical or legal cause for everything that followed.

Nursing During the Evacuation Crisis

When Chatelain took over care of Wilda McManus at four o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, the evacuation was in motion and transfer to another facility was still pending. In the chart, Chatelain documented the absence of air, lights, water, and toilet facilities. The note is a compact record of the environment in which ordinary nursing tasks had to continue: the patient remained under care while the hospital’s basic services had failed and a way out had not yet arrived.

A later chart entry records that at 11:40 p.m. Chatelain gave McManus two milligrams of Ativan intravenously for anxiety and calling out. The record identifies the medication, dose, route, time, and the distress it was used to address. It places her action within a prolonged evacuation emergency, but does not establish that the dose was intended to hasten death or that it had that effect. The distinction between a documented response to anxiety and conclusions not supplied by the chart is essential to understanding what this evidence can support.

Chatelain also administered medication to Elaine Nelson. According to the recollection cited in the book, she gave Nelson one milligram of morphine and one milligram of Ativan. The account identifies a small, specific combination of drugs, but offers no further clinical particulars here about Nelson’s condition, the circumstances of the administration, or its outcome. Set beside the entry for McManus, it shows Chatelain providing medication care to more than one patient during the crisis, while the available evidence remains specific about doses and limited about the surrounding decisions.

The Aftermath and Its Costs

Chatelain’s later life is described chiefly through the recollections of Moses and Catherine. They attributed her increasing use of alcohol and narcotics to her distress over the circumstances of Emmett Everett’s death. Their account links that distress to a progression that included the loss of her nursing license and her death in her early fifties from acute pancreatitis. The attribution belongs to her family’s testimony: the book reports their understanding of the connection, rather than establishing that distress as a medically proven cause of her substance use or death.

Catherine’s recollection presents Everett’s death not as a passing episode in Chatelain’s work but as an event her family believed continued to weigh on her afterward. The contrast is stark: in the crisis record, Chatelain appears through entries about patients’ immediate needs and the lack of basic facilities; in the family account, the consequences extend beyond the hospital into her health, professional life, and death. Together, those accounts make her story one of clinical work under extreme conditions and a later personal cost, while leaving the precise nature of her experience and the limits of causation visible rather than resolved.