quote: Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals
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.”
posted
I think it's quite possible. But I'm waiting for further media coverage on this. We'll probably get some indication sooner or later - they are going to do autopsies on the 40 or so bodies found in the hospital yesterday. I don't know if lethal doses of morphine could be detected at this stage, though.
As I was watching events on TV last week, I actually wondered if stories like this would emerge.
It's not surprising that at least a few exhausted, desperate doctors might take it on themselves to make these decisions.
But let's be clear on a few things -
If it's true, it had nothing to do with what the patients themselves wanted.
It falls into the same category with other instances of disinhibition of normal social behavior.
I know it's hard to think of "looters" and "doctors" in the same way for most people, but this is how I'm looking at the phenomenon.
Which will not be the way pro-euthanasia organizations spin it if this turns out to be accurate.
Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
NPR interviewed a doctor in New York who was corresponding, via text messages, with a doctor in a New Orleans hospital during the worst of it. That interview corroborates this story. I was, and remain, horrified.
Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Porter and I purchased the first season of "Lost" and I am watching it for the very first time. This question of ethics and morality, of course, came up.
quote:NPR interviewed a doctor in New York who was corresponding, via text messages, with a doctor in a New Orleans hospital during the worst of it. That interview corroborates this story. I was, and remain, horrified.
Tante,
do you have a little more information? I'd like to see if I can track the NPR interview down. Any of the following is useful info: date aired, name of show, name of correspondent - basically anything to help me nail it down on NPR's website.
posted
My question in reading the article was whether or not the doctors gave the patients a choice of lethal injection or evacuation. The two parts that really horrifie me are, 1) that the patient might not have been offered a choice where possible, and 2) that the people were left to die alone. No one should have to die alone.
If it's true. Though it would not surprise me at all if it is.
Posts: 5948 | Registered: Jun 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Horrible. Amazing that this kind of thing can happen in America. I mean you see the things that happen in other countries and you think that it can't happen here but Katrina showed that it can. Makes you think.
Posts: 832 | Registered: Jan 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote: The two parts that really horrifie me are, 1) that the patient might not have been offered a choice where possible, and 2) that the people were left to die alone. No one should have to die alone.
It seems to me that they were not left to die alone.
quote: If the first dose was not enough, I gave a double dose.
Leading one to believe that the patient wasn't alone, as the doctor made sure s/he was dead.
quote: “They injected them, but nurses stayed with them until they died.”
My question is, why would anyone talk to the paper about it? Papers really don't protect sources all that much anymore. Since this is illegal in LA, I'm surprised anyone would talk, knowing that the DA could come after them.
Posts: 9871 | Registered: Aug 2001
| IP: Logged |
quote:Amazing that this kind of thing can happen in America.
huh? Why are we so special?
I don't find this too farfetched. Doctors are mortal, subject to the same stresses of extremity as the rest of us.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
| IP: Logged |
quote:My question is, why would anyone talk to the paper about it?
A couple of different rationales come to mind:
The guilt-wracked medical professional needs to get it off his or her chest. Most importantly, they want someone to tell them what they did was OK.
Worst-case scenario: The person who originally went to the press is one of the large segment in the medical community who has strong beliefs about euthanasia - the disaster gave them a chance to put beliefs into practice. And now they have a chance to use this experience as an advocacy tool.
Please, at this point, I'm not making any bets on what the situation is here. Which rationale is the closest to the real one.
I really hope it's the first one. But I won't be in the chorus telling them it was OK.
Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
I don’t know what to think about this. On one level I’m horrified, but at the same time if it was me and there was no way to get me out I’d rather some one did give me that massive dose of morphine. The other options seem to be to be left to die alone (or possibly violently) or for someone to risk their life to wait with me. I don’t like either of the alternatives.
I guess for me, whether it was OK or not would come down to the individual patients choice. It would be very wrong to end someone’s life if they did not want it. On the other hand, if someone wants to have the morphine and die with a nurse there rather than either be left to die alone or risk someone else’s life then I think they should be able to make that choice.
Posts: 169 | Registered: Aug 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote: The CNN footage does not even begin to do it justice -- the roar of rotor blades, the smell of jet-A [fuel] and the thousands of eyes looking at us for answers, for hope...
Our busiest day, we off-loaded just under 15,000 patients by air and ground. At that time, we had about 30 medical providers and 100 ancillary staff. All we could do was provide the barest amount of comfort care. We watched many, many people die. We practiced medical triage at its most basic -- "black-tagging" the sickest people and culling them from the masses so that they could die in a separate area.
I cannot even begin to describe the transformation in my own sensibilities, from my normal practice of medicine to the reality of the operation here. We were so short on wheelchairs and litters we had to stack patients in airport chairs and lay them on the floor. They remained there for hours, too tired to be frightened, too weak to care about their urine- and stool-soaked clothing, too desperate to even ask what was going to happen next.
Imagine trading single-patient-use latex gloves for a pair of thick leather work gloves that never came off your hands -- then you can begin to imagine what it was like.
We did not practice medicine. There was nothing sexy or glamorous or routine about what we did. We moved hundreds of patients an hour, thousands of patients a day, off the flightline and into the terminal and baggage area. Patients were loaded onto baggage carts and trucked to the baggage area ... like, well, baggage. And there was no time to talk, no time to cry, no time to think, because they kept on coming. Our only salvation was when the bureaucratic Washington machine was able to ramp up and streamline the exodus of patients out of here.
Our team worked a couple of shifts in the medical tent as well. Imagine people so desperate, so sick, so like the five to 10 "true" emergencies you may get on a shift ... only coming through the door non-stop. Now imagine having no beds, no [oxygen], no nothing -- except some nitro, aspirin and all the good intentions in the world.
We did everything from delivering babies to simply providing morphine and a blanket to septic and critical patients, and allowing them to die.
Sorry, but I've got to see some pretty conclusive proof before I change my mind and no, a text message that someone reportedly saw is not conclusive proof.
I just don't see any doctors resorting to this, considering the potential ramifications. I mean, we could be talking about murder charges, or at the very least losing their license. I don't care how pro-euthanasia they are, I don't see a physician doing this.
Sounds like a rampant rumor that has just run wild and will be debunked in time.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
My mom told me about a nursing home where patients were apparently just left to die.
I'm not sure which is worse, in my books-- killing people apparently without giving them a choice, or just leaving helpless people to die.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
| IP: Logged |
quote:I would say what the doc did above sounds more like wartime triage than anything else.
And in a disaster situation, first responders are trained to do exactly that. My husband as a paramedic has drilled disaster triage before, and it's exactly as described. The terminal patients are given comfort care and they move on to people whom they can really help.
None of what I read there surprised or horrified me beyond "Oh my goodness, what a terrible tragedy this hurricane was." The type of situation described there is to be expected in a diaster situation the magnitude of this one. Very unfortunate and sad, but in a natural disaster the size of Katrina, people will die in the evacuation process. Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Yes... I could see how the npr story could morph into the other one also though. Even the earlier story doesns't truly sound like "killing" the patients, as the sensational headline says. They did have to make viability decisions with limited resources. I would imagine being tormented with guilt myself over the situation.
However even though morphine given was an overdose, it doesn't sound as if it was actually the *cause* of death. Whatever pre-existing condition that had them in the hospital in the first place, along with lack of available medication was probably the cause of death.
Also, if someone is on life support equipment that requires electricity, and the electricity and back up power are out, there isn't a lot a doc can do. It isn't like they deliberately "pulled the plug".
AJ
(on the other hand... should the critical cases have been evacuated before Katrina? Maybe. But many critical cases are so critical that moving them could kill them as well.)
Posts: 11265 | Registered: Mar 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
AJ - thanks for the "heads up" on both Hatrack and my email.
The NPR account is only jarring because other people in the media weren't really being honest - or didn't understand - what "triage" means. It was another thing I was grumbling about during coverage. They talked about separating the "easy to treat" from those who needed serious medical attention.
That's only two-thirds of the picture. The word is "triage" after all.
If it's triage, it means there are people being left to die. Not those "unworthy" or with a low "quality of life," but those who probably won't make it no matter what.
NPR got this one right even if most others glossed over it.
(And, yeah, leaving to die also means "make them comfortable if you can" - that probably means doping them up to the point of unconsciousness, which probably makes death come a little quicker, but it's really not the goal.)
Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
My friend Jerry was a resident at one of the hospitals in New Orleans, and he stayed there until all the patients were out. I think that's what he went through. We saw him on Friday - he was smiling and friendly, but definitely subdued. I wonder how this will affect him.
He had been in Dallas for a day and a half, and had already been down to the convention center to see if he could help with the evacuees staying there. They had enough for the weekend, but he was going back on Monday to be part of the medical team.
posted
I don't get how this is so obviously wrong. Like Banna said, it sounds like wartime triage (as an aside, sndrake, triage doesn't come from tri- meaning three, but trier which means "to sort" in French). Obviously we haven't gotten the whole story, but this doesn't sound, to me, as if they necessarily acted inappropriately.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
The way it was described just didn't sound like triage. There was a-- gloating quality to the article. Maybe it was just written by someone who didn't understand, and that was it.
Triage is sad but necessary. Like the hospital in Cuba my mom visited while on a medical mission there, which had exactly 5 infant incubators. They were given to babies on the basis of which ones were strongest and most likely to survive. Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
| IP: Logged |
But most of the coverage was still only doing two-thirds of what triage generally means.
And I don't find anything necessarily wrong with it. In a combat/disaster situation with limited resources to treat people and to move people out, that is what you do.
My grumbling at the coverage last week was that at it didn't cover that last aspect. Like this was one bit of reality the public wasn't ready for. Or something.
I remember Bill Frist saying that many were dying every day at the airport where he volunteered for a few days as a doctor. (I think I remember the number being 10, but I could be wrong.) I wonder if they're included in the death total.
Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
ketchupqueen... if you look at the original verbage it was out of a UK newspaper. UK papers have long been known for their sensationalistic journalism because they don't have quite the same libel laws there as they do in the U.S. So the writer was probably on or just above the level of someone who writes for the National Enquirer.
posted
And sndrake I totally agree with your points about lack of coverage. The media is so sensational yet so sanitized simultaniously. It's a really distorted view on reality.
posted
To be honest, I thought the tone of the first peice sounded like it was an activist piece done by a pro-euthanisia group. I wouldn't be suprised if it turns out to be false or at least innaccurate and poorly constructed. But the follow up stuff that people posted sounded like doctors making hard but not necessarily incorrect decisions.
edit:
snadrake, Oh, yeah, I agree with you about the coverage.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Frown]](frown.gif)
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[Embarrassed]](redface.gif)
