Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center

Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, a Franciscan-run hospital in Baton Rouge, became a working base for Anna Pou and her Louisiana State University head and neck surgery colleagues after the New Orleans hospitals where their department had been based did not reopen. Its place in the account is defined less by institutional history than by the demanding care delivered there: a prolonged operation on James O’Bryant, continued attention to his fragile recovery, and Pou’s presence with his family through later treatment.

A New Base After Katrina

The closure of the New Orleans hospitals disrupted the department’s former setting and brought its surgeons to Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center. The hospital was encountering patients with severe facial deformities who were new to its staff. For Pou and her colleagues, the change meant practicing in a different institution while confronting the consequences of complex head and neck cancer in a city whose major teaching hospitals remained closed.

Pou’s work there also belonged to a broader effort to rebuild specialist training. After her arrest, she was not performing surgery; her days in Baton Rouge were occupied by teaching and administrative duties connected with revamping the Louisiana State University head and neck surgery training program. The hospital therefore appears both as a treatment site and as part of the altered professional landscape left by the prolonged closure of New Orleans hospitals.

O’Bryant’s Operation and Its Limits

Before Katrina, Pou had treated James O’Bryant. When facial pain returned, scans showed that his cancer had grown again behind his left eye. O’Bryant hesitated over another extensive operation, but the chairman of Pou’s department, Dan Nuss, believed he could remove the tumor. O’Bryant agreed, and Pou joined Nuss to reconstruct his face at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center.

The operation took place on July 6 and lasted twenty hours. The surgeons removed tissue in stages, checking samples under a microscope as they worked deeper into the tumor. They eventually found that the cancer had invaded bone around a blood vessel that had previously been removed, an extension the scan had not revealed. Removing all of it would have required opening O’Bryant’s skull, an operation the surgeons judged he could not withstand. They closed his face as best they could, leaving part of the tumor in place. The episode makes the hospital a setting for a hard clinical boundary: prolonged and painstaking surgery could not overcome the limits imposed by the cancer’s extent and the patient’s capacity to endure further treatment.

Care Beyond the Operating Room

O’Bryant’s reconstructed face required careful handling after surgery. When Pou learned from his wife, Brenda O’Bryant, that nurses were unsure how to care for him, she gathered the staff and explained the procedures that had been performed and how he had reached his current condition. She emphasized that following the details of her instructions mattered to the healing of the fragile tissue. Signs in the intensive care unit warned staff not to put pressure on the left side of his face, head, neck, shoulder, or arm.

That response extended Pou’s role beyond the operation itself. Her attention to staff understanding and to specific precautions translated a complex surgical procedure into practical instructions for everyday care. The hospital’s unfamiliarity with patients with such facial deformities made that explanation consequential: the recovery depended not only on what the surgeons had done, but also on how others handled the reconstructed tissues afterward.

Continuing Involvement

After a later discharge, O’Bryant began bleeding at home. Brenda called Pou, who advised her to apply something cold and go to the nearest emergency room. Pou spoke with the emergency physician, asked that several things be checked, and kept Brenda on the phone even after a security guard escorted her from the emergency department for using a cell phone. Once the bleeding appeared to stop, Pou urged that O’Bryant remain under observation for at least an hour and then return to Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center by car or ambulance. She said she could not act without seeing him.

By late December, O’Bryant faced another major operation. Pou was occupied with teaching and administrative work rather than surgery, but she hurried to the hospital when Brenda called and arrived as O’Bryant was being taken toward the operating room. She stayed with Brenda and the family through the hours of waiting, and they rejoiced when he came through the operation. These episodes present Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center as the place where a disrupted medical department continued to treat a long-standing patient, while Pou’s relationship with the O’Bryants persisted across surgery, crisis, and the uncertainty of her own legal case.