Posted on 09/11/2005 2:36:06 PM PDT by kenth
Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.
In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.
Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials. One emergency official, William 'Forest' McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."
Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana, and The Mail on Sunday is protecting the identities of the medical staff concerned to prevent them being made scapegoats for the events of last week.
Their families believe their confessions are an indictment of the appalling failure of American authorities to help those in desperate need after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city, claiming thousands of lives and making 500,000 homeless.
'These people were going to die anyway'
The doctor said: "I didn't know if I was doing the right thing. But I did not have time. I had to make snap decisions, under the most appalling circumstances, and I did what I thought was right.
"I injected morphine into those patients who were dying and in agony. If the first dose was not enough, I gave a double dose. And at night I prayed to God to have mercy on my soul."
The doctor, who finally fled her hospital late last week in fear of being murdered by the armed looters, said: "This was not murder, this was compassion. They would have been dead within hours, if not days. We did not put people down. What we did was give comfort to the end.
"I had cancer patients who were in agony. In some cases the drugs may have speeded up the death process.
"We divided patients into three categories: those who were traumatised but medically fit enough to survive, those who needed urgent care, and the dying.
"People would find it impossible to understand the situation. I had to make life-or-death decisions in a split second.
"It came down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity.
"There were patients with Do Not Resuscitate signs. Under normal circumstances, some could have lasted several days. But when the power went out, we had nothing.
"Some of the very sick became distressed. We tried to make them as comfortable as possible.
"The pharmacy was under lockdown because gangs of armed looters were roaming around looking for their fix. You have to understand these people were going to die anyway."
Mr McQueen, a utility manager for the town of Abita Springs, half an hour north of New Orleans, told relatives that patients had been 'put down', saying: "They injected them, but nurses stayed with them until they died."
Mr McQueen has been working closely with emergency teams and added: "They had to make unbearable decisions."
I find this account hard to believe.
Yea but all the VA hospitals all got evacuated no problem !
Ditto.
susie
My God what a mess.
I used to think that we should rebuild the SuperDome. After reading this story, I don't think that building should be left standing.
>>>Yea but all the VA hospitals all got evacuated no problem !
They had a plan, and executed the plan effectively, unlike the mayor of NOLA and gov of LA.
me, too. Reads "bogus" on my antennae.
Disclaimer: sarcasm
I think too many things went on there for it to be considered a place of revelry or happiness ever again.
Careful, let's see if its true first. Something about this just doesn't ring true. I'd like to see it verified elsewhere before I buy it.
Excuse me if I don't believe this.
I guess you could call it triage if you wanted to forgive them. However, it is against the law. Hopefully those doctors will face a jury.
If the docs had nothing else, how did they have morphine? It may not be true. Hopefully not.
PURE BS!!!
Let's have the name of the doctor and the hospital. I want to send my mom there for sure.
Yes, I too find this hard to swallow. Sensationalism.
Personally I think this story is the figment of some coward's imagination that works at the Daily Snail.
This is no different from triage that has gone on on ballefields for years.
Not an outrage. It's called Triage, and it's an accepted form of medical practice in disasters and warfare. When medical capabilities are limited, you restrict access to it to the patients most likely to benefit from it. You don't waste medical resources on patients who are going to die anyway.
When triage deems a patient incapable of survival, the doctors only duty is to ensure that the patients death is as painless as possible. That's exactly what the doctors in this story did, and it's nothing that they should be chided for.
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