[Siouxz]

My wife takes considerably more morphine than that daily. Although it is possible that was enough to kill her, it is by no means certain. We have some information presented as fact that is not necessarily so. How many times is that repeated in this article?

A person who takes morphine on a daily basis will build up a tolerance to it. They will require higher doses in order to keep their pain under control (Tolerance is not the same as being addicted). Someone who does not take morphine regularly requires a great deal less to ease pain. So the amount your wife safely takes can easily be enough to kill another patient.

[Old Student]

“A person who takes morphine on a daily basis will build up a tolerance to it. “

Yes, that is true. But it doesn’t happen in the first week, or even first month. Do a google search on dilaudid, and see what size the oral tabs come in, for example. 8mg is a small dose. Also, please note that the woman we were discussing was taking morphine on a regular basis, too. 2mg doses, but no other facts to work from. 8mg is ony 4 times her normal dose. Depending on dosing schedule, she might well have gotten more that 8mg a day. One of the other posters here is asserting that is a lethal dose. Implying under any circumstances, which is simply not the case. My wife’s dosage is at the low end of the spectrum, particularly for chronic pain. 20mg was doing her no good at all, from the start. 30mg barely knocks the edge off for her. She can take up to 16mg more per day for breakthrough pain, and started on it less than a week and a half ago.

[Old Student]

“Family members of another one of the patients, Elaine Nelson, hired their own forensic expert to explore why the 90-year-old woman died. The report alarmed her son, Craig, a New Orleans lawyer. “It showed that Mom had received on September 1 eight milligrams of morphine, which was four times the amount that she was prescribed by her doctor, and which was a lethal amount that was certainly enough to kill her,” Nelson said. Nelson said neither he nor his sister Kathy, a registered nurse who was with their mother after Katrina until guards ordered her to leave the hospital, were called before the grand jury. Their forensic expert wasn’t called either.

Nelson has filed a lawsuit against the hospital owner and others. He said he refused a settlement offer because he wants the truth to come out, especially now that Jordan has closed the case. Nelson said he is disappointed in the way the grand jury was conducted.”

from Iwo Jima’s post #22