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U.S. Air Force nurses who honed their skills caring for soldiers injured in Iraq put those skills to the test as they helped evacuate Hurricane Katrina survivors from the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.
PHOTO BY MIKE MILINAC
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Military Nurses Called
Into Action at Home
Seasoned by war, U.S. Air Force nurses help evacuate critically ill victims of Hurricane Katrina.
by Janet Boivin, RN
Air Force flight nurses, most of them seasoned from bringing combat-wounded service members out of Iraq, helped evacuate some of the sickest survivors of Hurricane Katrina who had sought shelter at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.
Approximately 10,000 evacuees were flown by the Air Force from the New Orleans airport to San Antonio or to other states, where they were then taken to hospitals or shelters over Labor Day weekend. Of the 10,000 evacuees, approximately 2,000 had to be medically evacuated, according to Tech Sgt. Colleen Roundtree, a spokeswoman for the 433rd Airlift Wing based at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.
“Iraq helped prepare us for this,” says critical care air transport nurse Capt. Michael Dixon, RN, BSN, CCRN, with the 59th Medical Wing from the Air Force’s Wilford Hall Medical Center in San Antonio.
But instead of young, healthy patients who had to be transported by air because of serious combat wounds sustained in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of the individuals evacuated from the New Orleans airport were elderly and infirm.
“It [the airport] looked and smelled like a very big nursing home,” says Dixon.
In fact, many of the evacuees were nursing home patients who had been relocated to the airport for safety during or after the hurricane’s onslaught.
Maj. Cheryl Knight, RN, with the 452nd Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron out of March Air Force Base in Colorado, says many of the elderly she helped transport required just basic care, such as bathing and nourishment.
Dixon, who is part of a specialized critical care team consisting of a nurse, physician, and respiratory therapist, cared for four critically ill patients en route from Louisiana. They included a young woman with a recent head injury who had been in a long-term care facility, a woman recovering from abdominal surgery who was complaining of severe abdominal pain, and a man with a cervical fracture who was quadriplegic — and septic.
Another critical care air transport team cared for patients requiring dialysis and a patient who had had a recent liver and kidney transplant and was intubated, says Dixon.
At the New Orleans airport, Air Force Capt. Tamra Weatherbee, RN, MSN, helped prepare patients for flight out of Louisiana. When she arrived at the airport Friday night of Labor Day weekend, she says, “It was just chaos.”
Using skills honed in Balad, Iraq, Weatherbee helped organize the flow of patients from the airport into Air
Force aircraft.
“Patients weren’t being brought to us quickly enough,” she says. “We’re a CASF (contingency air staging facility), so we set it up just [as we had] in Balad.”
Capt. Rogelio Rodriguez Jr., with the Air National Guard’s 142nd Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron, from New Castle, Del., says, for him, caring for Hurricane Katrina victims was different than flying the wounded out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
“We’re dealing with people in our own backyard,” says Rodriguez, who works in the postanesthesia care unit at St. Francis Hospital in Wilmington, Del. “It hits closer to home.”
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