Whether it’s helping an aging parent, supporting a partner through illness or raising a child with special needs, millions of Americans are providing unpaid care to a loved one. And if they were compensated, it would cost around $600 billion a year.
WWNO and WRKF have partnered with the producers of the PBS documentary, Caregiving, to shine a spotlight on America’s caregiving crisis. We talked to people living in south Louisiana about their caregiving situations and the unique challenges the region brings when caring for others.
Dr. Ben deBoisblanc was a physician working at Charity Hospital when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast 20 years ago. The unexpected challenges he faced during that time reshaped his relationship with caregiving.
This story has been edited for length and clarity.
My name is Dr. Ben deBoisblanc. I just recently retired.
I was the medical director of the Charity Hospital Intensive Care Unit at the time of Hurricane Katrina. I remember as I was going into Charity Hospital, there were a couple hundred patients left in the hospital that we could not evacuate because they were too sick or we had no place to move them to, or we didn't have the resources.
So we were defending in place. We thought we would be out of there the next day. We've all been in experiences in public buildings where there's a little brown out and then usually there's a backup generator that starts up, and then sure enough, the power went out and the back generators came on. But within a few hours, those generators shut down.
And what we didn't know at the time was that there was probably 4 feet of standing water all around the hospital, and needless to say, FEMA didn't come on that Monday morning or Tuesday morning or Wednesday morning. We lost communication with the outside world and we were just living with the thought that someone was coming for us, but we had no way to know for sure, and so we just really were lost.
Even though we were incapacitated as a hospital, hundreds of people started coming into the hospital. And you're not gonna lock the door. There's no way you're gonna turn people away. So we had to deal with the extra burden of having all of these people from the community coming to the hospital. After we started to hatch this plan to evacuate patients, the mood seemed to improve and we gradually move patients one at a time in small boats over to the parking garage where we set up a little mini ICU. And over the period of about a day and a half from Wednesday to Thursday night, we evacuated them one at a time via helicopter. I was just so impressed with how compassionately and how professionally all of our health care providers acted in a scenario that was almost battlefield-like.
Finally, by Friday evening, we evacuated the last of our patients and finally closed the doors on Charity Hospital. All of the health care providers were just moving more slowly and more deliberately, and more compassionately in a way that I had never really noticed before. And it was just the opposite of what I had expected from people during a disaster. And I didn't realize how important and how wonderful that experience is, to have a human-to-human connection with the people you provide care for.
So in the last, well since Hurricane Katrina–really it was my epiphany out of coming out of Katrina–I have been a much better humanitarian at the bedside than I was earlier in my career, before it was a job, and then, uh, later in my career it became, it just became a such a joy to be able to give and to connect and be a part of people's lives. Get to know them as people.