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 said it in another post, I thought it was what I heard on the FNC interview. I went and looked up the article by the reporter who was being interviewed on FNC.
The article says they were in hosptials, not the Super dome. At least that is how this article begins.
I don't. I would have done the same thing.
"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."
While fully believeable, I will consider this just another British tabloid jab at the federal level utilizing one witness but having no back-up but anonymous sources. The scapegoats angle clearly proves this.
Getting critical care patients out in short order is extremely difficult. Heck, all levels of government didn't get anybody out who could not drive out on their own. It was a massive failure from top to bottom, and all deserve blame. Never again.
Docs are complicit in putting down patients all the time. They give careful instuctions to family about what is a lethal dose of morphine. My dad killed his mother that way, a woman he absolutely adored, and sustained him in very trying times, when it was all falling apart in their family, and he and his brother had to go to work in high school to support the family. They were very close.
Oh good the Superdome reference is gone.
We take an oath to do no harm.
Hospital orderly is an archaic term. Hospitals have RN's, LVN's, nurses aides, janitors, transport, etc. but they don't have orderlies. The nationwide Monster job board job board has tens of thousands of health care jobs, but only 2 employers posting that title. So the unnamed source has a job title made up by the writer, which is suspicious for the rest of it being made up as well.
If the source was an orderly, the source is very low level employee, unlikely to understand what was going on. Likewise a title NO "government official" is hardly qualifies as a ringing endorsement. This story has only anonymous sources, and these dubious.
WOW! I'm looking for words!
What I find appauling is that there was no provision for a non mandatory evacuation prior to the mandatory one. Why couldn't buses have been provided beginning 48 hours before the projected land fall for anyone wanting to leave but with no private means of transportation. I think the mayor should have at least had the authority to declare a volunary evacuation and started using the school and transit system buses. Both the city and state had a plan to use transports that they owned to evacuate vulnerable areas. Why didn't they execute those plans.
The real mess is the Daily Mail.
The leftist British tabloids are now into "making it up". The Sun ran a column that had helicopter gunships gunning down "looters" who were stealing diapers and foodstuffs.
No lie too large; no shot too cheap.
Ping. Some got debit cards but some got death.
They won't. No one will ever know their names.
This is accepted practice in extreme situations. Those who can benefit from care, get it. Those who can't are made as comfortable as possible.
Note the vulgar slang for terminating dogs and horses. What idiotic medical school gave this person a medical degree? And WHERE ON EARTH were the rescue helicopters that tax dollars send to FEMA, the Coast Guard, the National Guard, and various other government agencies? Good grief, a doctor could hire a private helicopter with a credit card!
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