Family Medicine Resident Recounts Hurricane Relief Efforts

Christopher Boston, M.D., can't go home again. That's because much of his hometown, Bay St. Louis, Miss., is no more.

Boston learned that firsthand on Sept. 3, when he and three colleagues drove from the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson, where he is a family medicine resident, to Bay St. Louis to deliver medical supplies and offer help to the survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

Joined by fellow residents Jennifer Bryan, M.D., and Philip Meredith, M.D., of Jackson, Miss., and Randy Easterling, M.D., of Vicksburg, Miss., Boston awoke at 6:30 a.m. that day, packed his car and headed south. He convinced the group to head to Bay St. Louis, one of the hardest-hit areas in Mississippi.

"The damage worsened every mile closer to the coast," recalled Boston. Along Highway 603, cars -- abandoned as people fled the rising waters -- lay scattered, some still on the roadside, some thrown down the bank beside the road. It appeared, said Boston, as if he and his friends had entered a war zone.

At the devastated Hancock Medical Center in the center of town, Boston and his colleagues talked to former hospital employees "who were running what was left of the hospital pharmacy," Boston said.

"The hospital administrator said the water rose to five feet in mere minutes," he continued. "They evacuated patients to the higher floors and watched as cars floated past the hospital."

Unable to help at Hancock Medical Center, Boston and his colleagues moved on. At the suggestion of American Red Cross volunteers, they stopped by the Second Street Elementary School, "a place I know well from my school days," Boston said. The people there had food, but they begged Boston and his friends for soap, sanitizer, mops, and new clothes and shoes. Most had received tetanus shots; those who hadn't asked when they would likely get vaccine.

As Boston and his group moved to their next stop, he said he watched people on the beach siphon gas -- no doubt mixed with seawater -- from an abandoned car. The group stopped briefly at Our Lady of the Gulf Church. The beach, once across South Beach Boulevard, stretched past the church’s front doors. The rectory was nothing more than a roof with a few studs struggling to support it. Apparently untouched from the outside, the church was stripped of pews and carpeting.

Boston and his friends moved on. They followed railroad tracks through Bay St. Louis and Waveland. The tracks, surrounded by scattered pieces of houses, curved in a corkscrew pattern through trees felled by water.

Along the way, they paused at a shelter in East Hancock Elementary School, where nurses directed Boston and his colleagues to patients. Among them were a woman with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who had no medication and a diabetic with severe coronary artery disease whose foot was horrendously infected. Boston dressed the man's wounds and wrote prescriptions for him and his daughter. The nurses would fill them at the Federal Emergency Management Agency station at Hancock Medical Center. Some patients just needed to tell their stories about the storm, said Boston.

The next stop was Gulfport Memorial Hospital's emergency department. The lights were on, and the water was running. Boston and his friends got credentialed to work in the hospital and then dived in to help.

"Patients hadn't taken medicines, not from noncompliance, but because they'd lost their medication with their houses," said Boston. He asked a woman when her abdominal pain began, and she answered, "Since I got out of the water.”

ER staff told of severely battered people who had clung to trees for hours. Some survived; others didn’t. One 5-year-old boy, who swam out of his home through his second-story window, was the only member of his family to survive. Several hospital employees were feared dead.

Boston toured the Disaster Medical Assistance Team station and heard of the work of crews from Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Texas and several other states.

"People helping people," Boston mused. "Throughout the day, they exemplified generosity, selflessness and empathy for fellow man."

At 4 a.m., traffic through the ER slowed. Boston and his friends packed their car to head home. They entered eerily dark streets, where only police and guardsmen patrolled.

"I looked to the stars, untouched by the battered buildings and scattered boats and cars," he said. "I thought of the changes I had seen and the changes that coastal citizens will endure for years to come."