I finally completed my slow walk across the main floor of the Arena where the evacuees would stay. I walked into another, small foyer, and then through some doors into what was clearly one of the biggest warehouses I had ever seen.
The open area was colossal, measuring about one-eighth of a mile on a side, with a huge ceiling that seemed as tall as the room was wide. A solid concrete floor slab ran in all directions to the walls, which towered gray and dull above everything. Huge flood lights hung from the ceiling, leaving no room for shadows anywhere. I had entered what appeared to be a titanic gray, fluorescently lit cube.
This was where the huge trucks commonly arrived, bringing the tons of equipment necessary for the various shows and events regularly scheduled at the Arena. There were three enormous trucks inside this cavernous room now, well off in the distance. They were large machines, but the great size of the room appeared to swallow the trucks up, making them appear like small digestible morsels in a mammoth, ravenous stomach used to consuming far more than it currently contained. Along its floor, people were scurrying in various directions as they prepared for the arrival of patients.
Entering through the doors into this expansive area, I saw that, while much of the room was wide open, parts of it were being curtained off. The part that I walked through now contained several long rows of computers staffed by volunteers whose job it was to check patients into the clinic. Evacuees were already standing in several short lines waiting to receive a medical record number and a hardcopy chart, formally entering them into the Harris County healthcare system. The survivors would give the chart to a nurse who would walk them back to a long corridor that I now saw began after the last row of computers, heading away in the distance. It was toward this corridor I began to walk.
Finally reaching this makeshift hallway, I joined the stream of people walking through. The corridor was compressed, made narrow by the rows of yellow curtains on either side. Above me was only the huge ceiling hundreds of feet away. Looking left and right, I saw the curtains had been drawn back every twenty feet or so, exposing a curtained off area that contained tables and chairs. The first large area off on the left said “Pharmacy,” presumably where patients would get the prescriptions filled that doctors would be writing. Patients were already there, winding serpentine-like through the area; apparently physicians were already seeing them in some unknown area up ahead. On the right was a sign that simply said “Labs”. To the left, one said, “Counseling”. Another one a few feet down said simply “Psych”.
Another twenty feet further down on the left the curtains ended, creating a space in the huge building that was taken up by a row of clean white sinks on the left, with paper towel dispensers on the right. Just to the right of this bank of clean sinks was yet one more drawn back curtain. A piece of printer paper had been taped on the curtains, and on it was printed “Family Medicine, Pediatrics”. I had arrived,
Walking in, I saw what looked more like a base camp than a clinic. To the right was “Peds” a collection of about ten “rooms,” i.e., small, closed off areas composed of aluminum poles on which orange curtains had been strung. To the left was “Family Medicine”, another collection of ten rooms. Turning and walking in the direction of family medicine, I saw in the center an open area with five rooms on the left and five on the right. The rooms extended no more than eight feet high; above them was the simple seemingly infinite space of the warehouse. The overhead fluorescent lights flooded everything with light. In each room were two cots, just like the cots that were out in the arena. The open section between them formed a “hall” that separated the two rows. In the middle of this hall was a long table. Barren today, it would over the next few days be filled with saline bottles, gauze, tongue depressors, prescription pads, and the makeshift patient charts.
The noise was terrible. There was a lot of construction going on in the open warehouse area on the other side of the “rooms” not thirty feet away. Volunteers were busy unloading huge eighteen wheelers that were full of supplies. Hammers were driving steel nails into hard wood, creating makeshift platforms. Plumbers were installing banks of sinks with running water. Computer wires snaked their way along the floors in huge bundles on the way to the pharmacy. Wheeling drills, whaling saws, and coughing engines all added to the background cacophony. Hardly the best place to see patients, but, it would need to do. It wasn’t a medical center, but a makeshift clinic.
Each pediatric and family medicine section had a charge nurse. This was the nurse who had overall responsibility for the nurses, supplies, and the general flow of patient treatment in her section. The charge nurses were the ones who would be in the thick of it, managing the flow of patients. They were by definition the people who knew what was going on.
The charge nurse for family practice was in the process of orienting new nurses to their responsibilities. One of her new nurses asked the question I wanted to ask.
“Where are our patients?” the young lady asked. She was young enough to be in nursing school.
“They come in waves,” the charge nurse, Glenna Whitney, responded. “Many of the evacuees are sick on the bus. It takes about forty minutes for the buses to unload their passengers and get them checked into our system now.” She paused for a moment, checking her watch. “I would guess we can expect a new group of patients in about fifteen minutes,” she predicted.
“How many buses are on the way now?” I interrupted, after introducing myself.
“Hundreds, Doctor.”