Dan Nuss

Dan Nuss appears in the account in two closely linked roles: as a surgeon responsible for difficult decisions at a patient’s bedside, and as a department chairman who mobilized colleagues when Anna Pou faced criminal charges. His work with James O’Bryant shows the limits of what surgery could accomplish; his defense of Pou shows how professional trust could become a public and institutional force. Nuss had not witnessed the events at Memorial during Hurricane Katrina, and Pou had told him little about them, yet he came to regard her character as decisive evidence of what she could not have done.

Surgeon and Department Chairman

Nuss was chairman of Pou’s department and an experienced surgeon whose judgment shaped O’Bryant’s treatment. Before Katrina, O’Bryant had been Pou’s patient. When facial pain returned, imaging showed that cancer had grown back behind his left eye. O’Bryant hesitated over another extensive operation, but Nuss believed he could remove the tumor, and O’Bryant agreed to let him try. Pou joined the operation to reconstruct O’Bryant’s face.

The surgery on July 6 lasted many hours. The surgeons removed tissue in stages, checking samples under a microscope for cancer cells before cutting farther. They found that the tumor extended into bone surrounding a blood vessel that had previously been removed—an invasion the scan had not revealed. Completely removing the cancer would have required opening O’Bryant’s skull, which the surgeons believed he could not withstand. After about twenty hours, they closed the wound as best they could, leaving part of the tumor in place. Nuss’s role here was not that of a surgeon promising a cure: the operation reached a boundary imposed by what O’Bryant could endure.

When O’Bryant’s pain worsened and his face began bleeding heavily, staff rushed him into an ambulance. He received two units of blood on the way to Baton Rouge. Pou prepared the operating room and called Nuss, telling him he needed to come in on a Sunday night. Nuss came; the nurses and surgical staff prepared, and they operated through the night. The account places this urgent return to surgery alongside the developing criminal investigation, underscoring that Pou’s professional life continued under mounting pressure and that Nuss remained directly involved in the care of her patient.

Trust in Anna Pou

By the time Pou’s arrest became likely, Nuss had learned through his connections that the attorney general’s findings might soon be released and would be damaging to her. A call from the attorney general’s office asking for Pou’s address heightened his concern. Nuss was not an eyewitness to Memorial’s evacuation or the disputed patient deaths, and Pou had not discussed much of what happened after Katrina with him. He nevertheless regarded her as a dedicated, ethical physician and rejected the possibility that she had harmed anyone.

Nuss extended that confidence to Cheri Landry and Lori Budo, nurses with whom he had worked for years. He could not reconcile the accusation that the three had formed a team to move through the hospital killing patients with his knowledge of their professional lives. He suspected that their accusers were less capable colleagues, angered by decisions made during the disaster. That was his interpretation, not a conclusion drawn from having observed the events himself. The distinction matters: Nuss’s certainty rested on personal and professional trust, while the criminal investigation concerned conduct he had not seen.

His response to the arrests was also immediate and emotional. He saw Pou’s arrest as a political act by the attorney general and was sickened by it. Calls and offers of help poured in from Pou’s former colleagues and from doctors who had never met her. Their outrage, like Nuss’s, reflected the difficulty many medical professionals had in accepting that caregivers who had pledged to save lives might have killed patients under disaster conditions.

Organizing a Defense

Nuss turned his position as a department chairman at a public university into practical support for Pou. In discussions with her attorney, Rick Simmons, he considered how to organize the offers of assistance and took time away from his regular work to establish a legal defense fund through his university office. He appealed to colleagues on Pou’s behalf, presenting her as a respected friend and physician in urgent need of support.

The appeal emphasized Pou’s work at Memorial after Katrina, describing her as having labored without sleep or nourishment amid desperate conditions and crediting her with helping prevent further deaths. Nuss asked for donations to the Anna Pou MD Defense Fund, which were sent to him at his office. Department secretaries also gave their off-hours to circulating letters and emails. Within a week, the campaign had collected about $30,000.

The need was substantial: criminal allegations meant Pou’s defense was not covered by malpractice insurance, putting both her professional reputation and personal assets at risk. The fund was intended to pay legal costs and defend her reputation. The effort therefore went beyond providing money for lawyers. It sought to build a public account of Pou as heroic and virtuous, an account Nuss and other supporters hoped would reach the attorney general’s office and the grand jury. In the book’s depiction, this defense also narrowed the space for open discussion: supporters challenged reporters seeking information, and in some New Orleans circles the events became difficult to discuss as though they had happened at all.

Loyalty and the Memorial Case

Nuss’s advocacy reveals how professional solidarity shaped the aftermath of the disaster. He treated his long experience of Pou and the nurses as a powerful counterweight to allegations arising from a chaotic hospital crisis, even though he had not been there to assess what they did. His position was not simply private reassurance: his title, university office, and access to a network of colleagues helped convert belief into organized fundraising and reputational defense.

The account places that loyalty against the unresolved questions surrounding patient care and evacuation. Memorial’s doctors had made a decision to place patients with do-not-resuscitate orders last for evacuation, a policy that confused the meaning of a DNR order with a judgment about who should be rescued. The evidence presented here does not establish that Nuss proposed or directed that policy. His documented role lies elsewhere: in the treatment of O’Bryant, in his confidence in Pou and the nurses, and in the campaign he built after the arrests. That separation is central to his portrayal. Nuss is both a physician who confronted the limits of an operation and an advocate whose certainty about colleagues became a force in the public contest over what happened at Memorial.