Pets at Memorial Medical Center

Pets at Memorial Medical Center were part of the hospital’s hurricane refuge as well as a responsibility its staff had to manage. Employees brought animals with them when they reported for duty, recorded them for tracking, and moved them as floodwater threatened the building. When evacuation aircraft and boats would not take pets, the animals became central to painful choices about who could leave together and who would remain. The account records both practical efforts to shelter them and a case in which an animal was subjected to an attempted euthanasia; it does not establish the ultimate fate of every pet.

Intake and Shelter

Staff assigned to work through the hurricane were expected to report by noon, collect wristbands and room assignments, and bring provisions for a period of self-sufficiency. Those bringing pets carried kennels and a three-day supply of food to the medical records department on the ground floor. Staff wrote each animal’s name on tracking forms and undertook to keep the animals out of patient areas. The intake procedure gave the pets an organized place in the hospital’s emergency arrangements, but it also depended on a specific floor remaining usable.

When rising water threatened the first floor, staff worried about both the emergency-room patients and the animals housed near the medical records department. Anna Maria Pou joined volunteers and National Guard soldiers in carrying kennels up a staircase to the eighth floor, where they were placed in unused surgical suites behind the intensive care unit. The move was a direct response to the risk of flooding, not a departure from the effort to keep the animals inside the hospital. As conditions changed, the pet shelter had to change with them.

The relocation also brought the animals into spaces designed for hospital work rather than long-term shelter. The unused operating suites became a temporary holding area for cages, while the clinical and evacuation demands around them continued. The book presents the animals as dependents whose needs staff had to account for during a crisis, but the available space and the hospital’s changing conditions shaped what that care could provide.

Evacuation and Separation

The hospital’s pet arrangements did not guarantee that animals could travel with their human companions. When rescue aircraft and watercraft arrived, their pilots would not permit pets aboard. Staff who had brought animals therefore faced a distinct barrier at the point of evacuation: a place on a departing vehicle might be available, but an animal could not necessarily accompany its owner.

One doctor was offered a place on a boat with her twenty-pound sheltie. She had trained the dog to lie inside a duffel bag, and several human companions said they would not leave without her. The doctor wanted to take the opportunity to go, but felt guilty about leaving colleagues and patients behind. John Thiele urged her to leave and reassured her that the remaining staff would manage. The episode shows how an animal could become part of a group’s decision about departure, rather than simply an item to be left behind; it also makes clear that the doctor’s departure was bound up with the people who chose to accompany her.

The prospect of evacuation also produced a different outcome for a Siamese cat. After aircraft and boats refused pets, an internist held the cat while Thiele prepared to euthanize it with potassium chloride. The animal got free during the first attempt, and staff caught it and tried again in a hallway near the second-floor lobby. The account does not say whether the second attempt succeeded. Its proximity to patients waiting for evacuation underlines how the hospital’s human and animal crises occupied the same crowded spaces, even when the procedures and decisions concerning them differed.

Repeated Moves and Uncertain Protection

Pets were not moved only once. After the storm, as water again threatened lower areas, animals that had been moved earlier were taken up to a parking garage facing Magnolia Street. Ewing Cook and his family joined the procession. Their hurricane party included their daughter’s three cats and Rolfie, a large Newfoundland; Cook followed Minnie with the dog’s folded metal cage. At the top of the stairs, Minnie waited for him, but he did not appear. Someone told her that Cook was in the security office and suggested she go check on him. The account ends this episode with that interruption; it does not provide an outcome for the animals’ transfer or Cook’s business there.

Cook’s family’s participation reflects a longer pattern described in the book: the Cooks and their children and pets habitually stayed at the hospital during hurricanes. Cook, who had recently retired from clinical practice and served as chief medical officer, joined the animal-and-cage procession during this evacuation. The presence of family pets was therefore part of how some hospital workers prepared to remain on site, even as the emergency repeatedly forced them to move both supplies and animals to safer locations.

Significance in the Hospital Crisis

The pets’ changing locations trace the practical instability of the hospital as floodwater threatened one floor after another: the medical records department, the eighth-floor surgical suites, and the parking garage. Each move required people to carry animals and kennels through a building already being used for patient care and evacuation. The arrangements were provisional, and their adequacy changed with the danger to the spaces holding them.

The episodes also reveal an uneven boundary between care for people and care for animals. Staff tried to house and track pets, and some companions made their own departure conditional on taking an animal. Yet rescue transport rules could exclude pets, while the effort to euthanize the Siamese cat arose from the same restriction. The narrative does not offer a single resolution: it records acts of sheltering, relocation, attempted separation, and attempted euthanasia, while leaving some outcomes unstated. Together, these details show how the disaster placed animal companions within the hospital’s emergency decisions without ensuring that they could be protected or evacuated on the same terms as the people who brought them.