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."
See post 177
I'm not angry at the doctors but they broke the law and should have to face the consequences. It's that simple. It's not a hard concept to grasp.
FOX was reporting this earlier today...but was in a rush to leave the house so didn't catch the entire story.
States don't have the ability to decontaminate tens of thousands of people and they don't have enough, if any, people trained and qualified to operate in the CBR environments. Nobody will convince me otherwise. Only the military, specifically the United States Army and Marine Corps have the ability to do that. If you think H2O caused problems for local authorities wait and see what happens when citizens are panicked by CB stuff, God forbid.
I hope you feel that same way if you are ever on your death bed and you have the choice of either certain painless death by morphine or certain painful death in a day or two.
I have a nice web site. It's not about death - it's about hope. And in case you didn't notice, this is the fourth anniversary of September 11th. People died so that must mean that I "get off" on death.
The world we live in is bringing lots of death and destruction, I'm not causing it. Nice try but no dice.
You must really be bored this evening.
Between NO and surrounding parishes, there were something like 2,000 school and transit buses. With 60 passengers each that's about 120,000 people who can be evacuated in one trip. It was in both the NO city and LA state plans to commandeer transport from various government entities like school districts to evacuate residents. If regular drivers had left, the governor could have ordered national guard units to drive. If an 18 year old who had never driven a large vehicle before could drive a shool bus to Houston, why not members of the national guard?
AND, all the patients were black!
Rush read it in an e-mail from some friends of his from New Orleans on Friday. There have been a lot of stories that have been "debunked," but I for one no longer have any trust in the "debunkers."
I caught The English Patient last weekend on tv. It's too complicated to explain but it was troubling to watch. In other words, it wasn't a comedy. Once was enough for me.
Thank you for telling these people what life is like in the real world of medicine and war. And this hospital was in a "war zone" atmosphere. I totally agree with the ethics of making the agonized dying patient as comfortable as possible. That is standard operating procedure. And doctors have been shooting too much morphine into patients probably since iv lines were invented. We are not God. We can not cure the dying, but only be merciful and hope that some kind doctor will do the same for us when we are at the end.
The Daily Mail has journalistic standards lower than the National Enquirer.
I'm not buying this crap.
OK, what does CBR mean? It sounds like it isn't very salubrious, whatever it is. You army guys are so into acronyms. God created the English language, with 1.5 million words and counting, for a reason. How many words of that do I know? I don't know. If it exceeds 150,000, I would be susprised. It might be less. And I don't have many decades left, to learn the remaining 1.35 million.
Since you support this lawless act you are presumably equally willing to forgive the looters and robbers in NO and maybe even the shooters because they were just trying to survive?
Situational ethics like yours are at the center of the decline of society. If it's against the law it should be punished. I guess you can't grasp that concept.
The 18 year old was 20, and he drove out two days after the storm. Great story though. There was no capacity to get drivers from anywhere to drive those buses in a timely way before the storm, absent the US military getting on the move immediately.
"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"
He did have this authority, according to the southeast Louisiana emergency evacuation plan that has been posted to FR several times.
Chemical, biological, radiological. But its been a long time a long time since I was the Company CBR NCO. Maybe they call it NBC now. LOL
All I know is that I would never want to be in a position to have to make a decision like this. But in the end, a lot of the fault lies with the incompetent mayor and governor and possibly hospital officials -- most of these patients SHOULD have been evacuated on Friday when it was obvious that the storm was coming, at that point there was ample time to save these people.
I don't know about this article but if true the deaths lie with Blanco for not ordering the guard in to control the hospitals.
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