Caroline Graham, US Correspondent for the Mail on Sunday.
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."
Let's see. Raped little girls, bodies in excrement, cannibalism. Now this.
It MUST be true, I read about it in the media! /sarcasm
Welcome to FR. Lurk a while to get a take on the real world. Or, do we need to get into ZOT standby mode, here?
I find it hard to believe also. Sounds to me like more things to blame Bush for.
Caroline Graham, US Correspondent for the Mail on Sunday.
L0L I suppose you are correct :)
It's not.
have you seen this one?
Right. The Daily Mail is only a little more reliable than our own National Inquirer. In fact I wouldn't even give it that much credibility, this article may well be nothing more than pure fiction.
Or if not and there is some truth to the story, you can be sure that whatever vestige of fact it may contain has been generously sensationalized to make the rag more salable.
Triage is not euthanasia
What was a Utility manager from the town of Abita Springs, LA which is on the north side of Lake Ponchartrain doing in NO at a hospital during the Hurricane?... Why wasn't he taking care of his town and their inhabitants and the utility system he was in charge of?...
It's for damn sure he didn't get into NO via the I-10 section that crosses Lake Pontchartrain... It no longer exist in some sections.
Even if there is no source, can you doubt that it happened; and it now get sensationalized, for no reason, except to sell papers.
Simply another example of the low level of discourse that "informs".
First, I doubt the verasity of this article. Secondly, any medical personal that "put down patients" should be charged with murder.
You edited the title to include Superdome?.....
WHY?...... there is no mention and no indication that the Superdome was involved in this story?...
I, too, find it hard to believe. I can't imagine it's true for most of the doctors. I hope it's not true. If it is true, I hope it is just the desperate actions, not of a 'savior' doctor, but of a euthanasia wannabe, a Dr. Kevorkian type exposing himself and looking for public affirmation. Either way, I hope some effort is made to get to the bottom of the story, true or false.
This doesn't quite pass the smell test. What corroboration is there?
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