Susan Mulderick—Richard Deichmann

Susan Mulderick—Richard Deichmann describes a command relationship at Memorial Medical Center that combined practical coordination with growing disagreement over how to manage patients during the Katrina crisis. Mulderick, the hospital’s incident commander, and Deichmann, its medical chairman, faced decisions in which delays and classifications carried immediate consequences. Their most consequential divergence concerned whether DNR patients would eventually be evacuated and whether euthanasia should even be discussed.

Shared Command Under Pressure

As the hospital’s conditions deteriorated, the two worked within an emergency structure in which decisions about staffing, patient movement, and outside rescue had to be made amid limited communication and uncertain resources. When Coast Guard personnel were pressing to continue rescues overnight, the prospect of evacuating seven LifeCare patients on ventilators became especially urgent: water was rising, and a power failure might come within hours.

Deichmann was asked what the Coast Guard officer should be told about sending more helicopters. He directed staff to request them in the morning, judging it too dangerous to reopen the helipad and believing the exhausted staff needed rest. In a separate conversation with LifeCare incident commander Diane Robichaux, Mulderick said the men available to help carry critical patients downstairs had gone to bed. Robichaux agreed to wait until daybreak, when LifeCare could also arrange ambulances to transfer patients to other facilities in its system. The parallel decisions show the pressures on the hospital’s command team, while also placing the delay within a wider logistical and organizational context.

DNR Orders and Evacuation Priority

At an earlier meeting, Memorial’s doctors had made an exception to the usual principle of moving the sickest patients and those dependent on machines first: patients with Do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders would be evacuated last. Four ICU patients fell into that category, including Jannie Burgess, a Black nurse who had worked for decades in New Orleans hospitals but had once been barred from receiving care at Memorial when it was Southern Baptist Hospital. Her presence made the policy’s consequences legible through both a patient’s medical classification and a longer history of unequal access to care.

Deichmann later explained that he believed the law required DNR patients to have a certified terminal or irreversible condition. He also thought they had the least to lose if catastrophe struck. But a DNR order meant that a patient whose breathing or heartbeat stopped should not be revived; it was not the same as a living will authorizing life-sustaining treatment to be withheld or withdrawn. The distinction mattered when staff stopped a bed-bound patient’s evacuation after discovering her DNR status. Her daughter asked to rescind the order, explaining that she had consented to no resuscitation, not to her mother being left behind. The patient was moved toward rescue after a doctor was found to cancel the order.

Disagreement Over Euthanasia

Years later, Deichmann recalled a private conversation in which Mulderick asked whether euthanizing the hospital’s DNR patients would be humane. He said he answered that euthanasia was illegal and that the patients were still meant to be evacuated, even if they went last. Mulderick, through her attorney, denied ever discussing euthanasia with Deichmann or anyone else at Memorial. The account therefore preserves a serious disagreement not only about what should be done, but also about whether the conversation occurred as Deichmann remembered it.

Other staff members interpreted the question of euthanasia differently, underscoring how unclear communication could widen the gap between participants’ understandings. Deichmann remembered earlier differences with Mulderick over the evacuation as comparatively minor, though they had sometimes left employees unsure whose direction to follow. He regarded the alleged euthanasia discussion as a much more fundamental conflict: in his account, placing DNR patients last still meant that they would be rescued eventually, not that their lives could be ended.

The Limits of Command

The relationship’s significance lies in the distance between a stated plan and what people understood that plan to permit. The last-priority rule did not itself cancel a patient’s right to rescue, yet staff and families encountered its effects as an obstacle to evacuation. Meanwhile, overnight decisions to defer helicopter access and wait for rested helpers placed vulnerable patients in continuing danger, even as they were framed as judgments about safety and available personnel.

The record does not settle every disputed intention or recollection. It does show that Mulderick and Deichmann were working within the same crisis while assigning different meanings and limits to decisions about delay, DNR status, and euthanasia. Their relationship captures a central problem of Memorial’s emergency response: command authority could organize action, but it could not ensure that a protocol’s meaning was shared by the people expected to carry it out.