I first learned about this occurring from a friend whose relative works in a New Orleans hospital, and I felt like I’d been socked in the gut. I was loathe to talk about it, because I didn’t want to cause trouble for private citizens, but it’s a matter of public record now. Doctors in New Orleans authorized the euthanasia of terminal patients, rather than subject them to worse deaths or victimization. They found themselves on the horns of a dilemma I can’t even imagine, because of the hell New Orleans descended into. It’s illegal, but it’s arguably merciful.
— story below the fold —
We had to kill our patients
by CAROLINE GRAHAM and JO KNOWSLEY
The Mail
Sunday 11th September 2005Doctors 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.
Triage — To assign patients into three groups by degree of urgency of illness or injury.
“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.
Euthanasia — The painless killing of a patient suffering from terminal illness.
“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.”…
“It came down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity.”
