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 thought it had something to do with man made toxic agents. I might be uninformed, but I ain't stupid. :)
GWB offerred to take control of the evacuation. Governor Blanco refused. I don't want the US military taking over my city every time a hurricane threatens to hit.
You have too much information. Careful of that it's like politics, too much input and you end up like Pat Buchanan. Running for POTUS with Lola Fulani. :-}
Hearing part of this story on FOX today I just felt incredibly sad for the doctors. Oh the horror.
So, if you're Mom was there and she was terminal with just days to live, and this hurricane was on the way and the power was about to go out, you wouldn't have wanted a Dr. to make sure she died peacefully? What is wrong with you?
I don't think you'll find anybody in favor of that. I believe what Torie is saying is that it is reasonable to codify situations where "martial law" is an absolute necessity. This can be done narrowly and should be left to legislators to make the call but once the call is made the CIC should execute that decision.
Nobody said you were causing it; I just said you're fascinated with it.
I want what you don't want. I guess we can duke it out in the public square. But then I am used to having another point of view from Paleos, in as much as I am a Neo. It is amazing that we can be in the same party. Big tent indeed.
My mother would be the first to say: take me and let a heathier person live. The thought of my mother in needless pain and suffering and I would be BEGGING a doctor to help her go peacefully.
If Blanco and Nagin are not impeached and prosecuted, it will be a travesty. But I think the question of prosecution will be weather it is done under federal or Louisiana law. Depending on the sequence of events, I have a feeling that jurisdiction would be with the state. These two are lucky that the looters didn't have access to TV or radio; because I think that if they had known how badly Nagin and Blanco had screwed up, the mobs would have killed them.
No, if I were Bush, I would have taken control, declared martial law or whatever was necessary, Sat am, before the storm, when Blanco failed to follow my orders immediately, and left it to the courts to sort out later. That is assuming I thought I could make a difference. I would have called the US military to find that out. If it got me impeached, fine. But of course it would not have.
PING - if it's been substantiated it's ugly.
oh CRAP!!!
Certainly you would have been impeached, and rightfully so. You take an oath to uphold the laws, you break the laws, you get impeached and convicted. That is as it should be. That would be the courageous part of making such a move. As it will turn out though, this is not the disaster that it could have been or was represented. It is bad enough, mind you, but it could have been far, far worse.
There's one line in it that says "American authorities." An earlier post said it's a U.K. tabloid piece. Could be. Could also be an attempt to stir up some stuff.
I would not have been impeached (not with Delay running things), and declaring martial law in a national emergency is on the books. Sure if I had known that the storm would suddenly deflect and degrade at the last moment, I would have just bitched slapped Blanco on TV, early and often. But I didn't know that. My best information is that the odds were high that NO would have been blown apart, and then anyone remaining alive, drowned, or most of them, and with that material risk, I would have just have done it, and accepted the consequences. Of course Bush didn't know that, because one of his flaws, is that he lacks a certain intellectual curiousity, and is not very good at moving fast, when fast is the only speed that is safe.
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