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."
Bullcrap. Only one named source...telling his folks they had to "put down" the patients...sounds like fiction for pay.
I do notice that the good doctor escaped with her ass intact, though. Flow charts, euphemisms, and priortization seems to have worked well for her personal outcome.
"We did not put them down..." like a horse with a fractured tibia..."We made them more comfortable". She should and could have enlisted the assistance of a gang member to relieve the pain with a bullet to her patients brain. It might have been faster than the MS or dilaudid.
The unit cohesion seemed to dissolve as Ms.Dr. forgot the addage, "Do no harm". Had she come thru the marines and subscribed to the idea of never leaving your fellow marine behind, more people might be alive today. Expediency is the coin of her realm. I wonder if she obtained informed consent to kill her patients. I am told by my friend, a lawyer, that a patient cannot sign away the right of a physician to commit a tort or a crime. They do not possess that power under law.
Wow!
Now the telegraph is reputable.
This is getting legs
I doubt this story is true, but killing patients should not be covered up for fear of the perpetrators being labeled scapegoats.
I saw an interview with a pathologist who claimed to have been the ONLY doctor in the Superdome. He said nothing of this sort. I do not trust this story.
Not sure if I buy this.
Until sources are named to their own hurt, I don't see how the public can be expected to believe this.
So many people are willing, no, make that anxious to believe the worst. How long before we start hearing about flying saucers and alien babies in the Super Dome? (Always looked a little like a sci-fi project anyway.)
The DUmmies are praising this.
From the article, it appears God had decided....these were patients with no hope of survival, 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?
But if they were in Triage mode, why were they using their prescious resources to give multiple doses of morphine, a non-renewable commodity, on euthanizing patients? Would't it have been better to use it in pain management for those who had a good chance of living?
Fine. But wrap your brain arond the fact that there were a given number of terminal patients all along the Gulf Coast before the storm hit, Their time to die would have been, inevitably, as the the storm peaked and the dikes broke.
Doctors who were there did what they needed to do. A double shot of morphine is not unheard of, even outside of disasters, Usually, it is not considered newsworthy. But, it happens to ease suffering.
In the name of all that is holy, this had better not be true.
***puke***
I know they did- I have friends who did that evac- it is a SHINING example of how to "git 'er done"...the VA docs and nurses were awesome.
Here's a quarter - call someone who cares.
What the DU says is about as interesting as "already posted here"
I think this flat-out false.
It is another urban myth in the making, like the 7-yo with the slit throat.
One would hope so...but a moment of "fame" seems to be a temptation that break up all boundaries
Correct.
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