Published on nola.com
July 20, 2008 9:32 AM
By Easha Anand, The Times-Picayune
Link to original article

It had all the trappings of a road-trip buddy flick. An idle phone call and well-meant "what if" snowballed into an 18-hour drive with a generous supply of Zapp's potato chips, Hubig's pies and Abita beer.

Except in this case, the snacks were to give away, the destination was recently flooded Iowa, and the buddies were emergency room nurses from the New Orleans area. And even as they helped resuscitate their counterparts up north, driving a Ryder truck stuffed with donations to two Iowa hospitals, the nurses put the final sutures in some of their own post-flood wounds.

"It really felt like we'd come full circle, that we could think of someone else," said Cheryl Carter, East Jefferson General Hospital's emergency room director. "The trip was as therapeutic for us as it was for them."

Big Relief in the Big Easy began, Carter said, when some East Jefferson nurses touched base with hospitals in Iowa. Amid memories of working full-blast after Katrina, the nurses started to wonder: What if they mailed a package of extra scrubs to the Iowa nurses? Or, what if they solicited donations for the small things that kept them going after the storm? And then what if, after appealing to other nurses and donors, they got so many donations that they would be too expensive to mail?

So on the morning of July 11, Carter, Beverly Marino, Layne Mistretta and Bernie Cullen of East Jefferson General, along with Kerry Jeanice of West Jefferson Medical Center, Louisiana State University nursing instructor Karen Filaby and one chef-spouse, hit the road.

They had $6,000 and a truck filled with toiletries, cleaning supplies and clothing. When they pulled up to St. Luke's Hospital in Cedar Rapids, the Iowa nurses started clapping.

The Louisiana nurses started crying.

"It was moving, almost spiritual, to see folks who had gone through a very similar set of circumstances reach out to us in our time of need," said Ted Townsend, the CEO of St. Luke's.

Big Relief from the Big Easy made vats of jambalaya -- a bit milder, Carter said, for Iowa tongues -- and threw Carnival beads from their truck. They played zydeco music, and they told hospital administrators what East Jefferson General had done to support its nurses during the storm.

Katrina comparisons were inevitable, Marino said. The standing water gave Cedar Rapids "that Katrina smell," and the site for their picnic in Iowa City, where they delivered supplies to the University of Iowa Hospital, was City Park.

Carol Rowland, vice president of the St. Luke's Health Care Foundation, related examples of small acts of heroism similar to those that were everywhere after Katrina: the housekeeping staffer who went home only to pick up uniforms from her flooded house and the bioengineer who climbed onto the hospital roof to install a new antenna.

But while St. Luke's treated twice its usual patient load because a second Cedar Rapids hospital staff evacuated, St. Luke's saw only one death suspected of being flood-related.

"What we went through was minor compared to what you went through," Rowland said. "But the nurses from Jefferson Parish understood what it means to rise to an occasion like this."

Easha Anand can be reached at eanand@timespicayune.com or 504.883.7062.