"Daring Rescue from the Superdome!" (Has the Daily Mail covered this story yet?)
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."
This needs to be investigated and if found to be true, some doctors need to go to jail. There is no excuse for this since helicopters were rescuing people and these doctors had no way of knowing when they would be rescued.
LOL,now go to your room.
Incorrect...these were patients whom doctors decided had no hope of survival. Big difference.
so I can surmise from your post, that rather than having a more merciful death, you would have just left them behind to die, have them linger painfully and have their situation exacerbated by dehydration or starvation?
I would have let God decide instead of playing God. Using suffering as justification for killing is a dangerous philosophy.
You know, I think you get off talking about death. That's all you ever post about.
This is just another fabricated tabloid horror story designed to take GW down and make him look like Dr. Death.....and there will be more viciousness to come.
So fasten your seat belts, freepers.
Leni
Sounds like some trigger-happy secular humanist right-to-die enthusiasts on the staff got a little itchy.
And the relatives of the patients will never tell...
another day another FAKE story from england.
Sidney Blumenthal strikes again...
Clintons at work.
"Daring Rescue from the Superdome!" (Has the Daily Mail covered this story yet?)
>>
With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city . . .
<<
CORRECTION:
With gangs of DEMOCRATS rampaging through wards in the flooded city . . .
you said"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." I would never convict them, they did what they had to do to keep them from more suffering.
Well Nagin said there were no drivers for the buses. They were unavailable. Makes sense, since there was no plan or call to make them available, and even if called, many would have not shown up. They were out of town already I suspect. That is why we need a tough, butt kicking, order giving, won't take no for an answer, US army general, with absolute authority, to manage the whole thing, particularly when dealing with getting massive numbers of folks out BEFORE the storm, when you have about 48 hours to do it all. If Bush wants to redeem himself, he needs to get a law passed to do precisely this.
Wait and see.
I know that's common on the battlefield and at natural disaster sites. Doctors and medics have to make life and death decisions and it's common accepted practice.
However, this wasn't a battlefield and even though it was a natural disaster the decisions made, according to this report, could have been prevented with some planning.
Leaving your patients to die a painful death is doing harm.
What do you think about the Daily Telegraph?
Sorry. Mercy killing is illegal in Louisiana. If this is true they should have to face the law. Whether you could find any jury to convict them is another matter.
Mooooommmmm, I didn't mean it. C'mon.
Uncorroborated Brit crap-scandal.
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.
Uncorroborated Brit anti-Bush crap scandal. You know also, of course, that prominent anti-American black activist Randall Robinson wrote that black people in NOLA were eating their own dead?
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