Elaine Nelson

Elaine Nelson was a ninety-year-old patient at LifeCare Hospital at Memorial during Hurricane Katrina. Her daughter, Kathryn Nelson, stayed beside her through the hospital’s worsening crisis and witnessed both a brief improvement in her condition and the uncertainty surrounding medication administered for comfort. After Elaine died, toxicology findings placed her among the LifeCare patients whose deaths investigators scrutinized. Her story became inseparable from Kathryn’s insistence that her mother’s wishes and the truth about her death deserved serious attention.

Illness and Care at LifeCare

Kathryn Nelson found her mother in a room near the nursing station, where a nurse was fanning her. Elaine was breathing with effort, her eyes glazed, and her chest congested. Staff were using an improvised suction device—a plastic tube attached to a syringe—to clear secretions from her airways. Her temperature had reached 106 degrees. The scene was grave, but the evidence also records practical acts of care: the nurse remained at Elaine’s bedside, and Kathryn asked for medicine that might make breathing easier.

The nurse agreed that Elaine appeared to need comfort and administered a small dose of morphine and Ativan under orders an infectious-diseases physician had left earlier that night for patients who might need them. The nurse warned Kathryn that the medicines could sometimes cause a patient like Elaine to stop breathing. That warning frightened Kathryn enough to keep watch through the night without sleeping. It also framed the medication in two sharply different ways: as treatment intended to ease distress in a critically ill patient, and as a potentially consequential intervention whose risks her daughter could not ignore.

By morning, Elaine’s fever had broken. Her body felt cooler, her color had improved, and her eyes were open rather than glazed. The nurse no longer heard congestion in her lungs. These changes did not mean that Elaine had recovered or that the danger had passed; Kathryn remained worried. But they gave her a reason to feel encouraged as helicopters arrived at the hospital’s helipad in succession. The rescue activity offered a visible sign that patients were being removed from the increasingly difficult conditions inside Memorial.

A Daughter’s Farewell

Kathryn had trained as a registered nurse and had worked in an intensive care unit. She believed that even patients in comas could hear and remember what was said to them. When she was given a few minutes to say goodbye, she told Elaine that she was the best mother a girl could have and that she was proud to be her daughter. At about 11:15 a.m. on September 1, 2005, Kathryn kissed her mother, prayed over her, and left LifeCare with the nurse executive.

Leaving did not end Kathryn’s connection to the hospital or to her mother’s fate. She had resisted being made to leave Elaine’s bedside, and her departure came under pressure from staff concerned that she might miss the chance to get out. Later, when investigators spoke with her, Kathryn recalled that she had blurted out that she was dying too as she was forced away from her mother. Her words conveyed how thoroughly their immediate safety had become bound together: Elaine was critically ill, while Kathryn was being urged to leave a hospital from which evacuation was underway.

After leaving Memorial, Kathryn waited downstairs as long as she could before boarding a boat. A young woman behind her then asked who she was and told her that her gravely ill mother had died. On reaching dry ground, Kathryn was picked up by her brother. She walked through polluted, chest-high water to her home to rescue her cats. With nothing dry to sleep on inside the foul-smelling house, she and one of the cats spent the night on top of her flooded car. She later entered a Shreveport hospital with suicidal thoughts and depression. The aftermath thus extended beyond the news of Elaine’s death: Kathryn faced displacement, the loss of her familiar surroundings, and a severe mental-health crisis while still seeking answers about her mother.

Investigation and Toxicology

Kathryn cooperated with the state investigators examining deaths at LifeCare. In an October 3 interview, she described what she remembered from the storm and the time she had spent on the seventh floor. By then, her family had only recently located Elaine’s body in a large temporary morgue in St. Gabriel, Louisiana. A volunteer coroner from Wisconsin told Kathryn that an autopsy had been performed because euthanasia was suspected. That explanation turned the question of medication into a question about whether Elaine’s death had involved an act intended to hasten it—an allegation, not a conclusion established by the information available here.

The investigation later reported toxicology findings from eighteen samples: nine tested positive for morphine, and roughly five or six for midazolam. Elaine Nelson was among the patients whose names appeared on the investigators’ list of suspected deaths and whose samples were positive for the drugs. The laboratory had not been given that list beforehand; the names associated with positive findings matched it. The match strengthened investigators’ concern about the cases, but a positive result by itself does not establish who administered a drug, why it was given, or whether it caused a death. For Elaine’s case, the contrast between the documented comfort-care orders and the later suspicion remained central.

Kathryn’s Testimony and Elaine’s Significance

Kathryn told investigators that she did not believe any circumstance justified euthanasia. Her objection rested not only on a religious conviction that killing violated God’s law, but also on her position as Elaine’s longtime caregiver. She believed she knew her mother’s character, what she would have wanted, and whether she was suffering. Yet, Kathryn said, nobody had asked her opinion. The omission mattered to her because she understood caregiving as more than being present at a bedside: it had given her knowledge of her mother that should have counted when decisions about Elaine were made.

She described Elaine as strong and committed to doing what was right, recalling that her mother placed a dollar in every purse she donated to Goodwill so that whoever received it would have a little extra. This modest habit gave Kathryn a concrete way to assert that Elaine was a particular person, not simply a critically ill patient or a name in a toxicology report. Kathryn offered to write down everything she remembered from the storm through the day she was made to leave LifeCare, and told the investigators that their work was extremely important. Elaine’s place in the book’s account therefore extends beyond her illness and death: her case exposes the distance between medical records, investigative suspicion, and a family member’s demand to be heard. The evidence leaves the cause and circumstances of her death contested, while making clear that Kathryn continued to seek an account that recognized both her mother’s life and her own knowledge of it.