NPR has been running an investigative story that managed even now to shock me senseless. Nobody else has touched it among the media or even the blogs, as far as I can see.
One floor of NOLO’s Memorial Hospital was leased to a nursing home.
There, doctors and nurses were faced with few options. Conditions were deteriorating rapidly, evacuations were sporadic and security was compromised. Staff agonized whether to attempt to transport critically ill patients who might not survive the arduous evacuation. It appears another choice was considered: whether to end the lives of those who could not be moved. In the court documents reviewed by NPR, none of four key witnesses say they knew who made the decision to administer lethal doses of painkillers to the patients. But all four heard discussions that a decision had been made to end patients’ lives. According to the documents, attorneys for LifeCare self-reported all of this to the Louisiana attorney general’s office on Sept. 14, 2005.
That patients were killed seems factual. Whether those who made that decision deserve prison or praise is less clear. Listen to the NPR reports and decide for yourself. In all the heartbreaking reports, recriminations, and testimony about Katrina, nothing has shaken me like this story. Nothing has slammed home the horror and the criminal incompetence and indifference that revealed the mighty US of A as a pathetic banana republic like this story. Even after all those TV hours with Katrina, nothing has made me tear my hair and scream “How could this happen?” like this.
Listen to the audio, to the personal stories and interviews. They may change you forever.
How is it that a story this unbelievable, this counter to everything we’ve believed about our society, has been met with complete indifference in the media, including most of the usual blog suspects? I really don’t understand.
Dave, Anderson Cooper has flogged a very similar story (maybe the same one?) on his show for months …
that some of the doctors in the hospital in most desperate shape were discussing putting some people out of their misery since it didnt’ look like they’d be rescued …
one doctor heard the talk and claims that he decided to leave the hospital, and his patients, rather than participate. (Conservative CHristian view.) I get angry every time CNN has him on since his leaving the hospital/patients seemed to be more to do with what bothered HIM instead of sticking around to try to intervene or save people’s lives.
If the nurses/doctors felt they had no choice, and people were suffering terribly — it was horribly hot, no air conditioning, they were running out of fluids, the stench was unbearable, etc., etc., etc. — I’d call such an act a kindness.
Susan, I think you have to listen to the story and the interviews to get the real impact. Whether the staff did the right thing is not clear. What’s mindblowing is that an alleged first-world country could let this happen. It wasn’t that hard to evacuate a damn hospital.
I know, I know, we’ve heard it all before. I watched and listened as much as anybody during the disaster, but nothing hit me as hard as this. It gives the lie to everything we’ve ever thought our society is about. Just listen.
Maybe the citizens of this country has felt this way all along, and maybe this current criminal government of ours has made it okay for the average person to act on what they have always felt: Some elements of our society are expendable. . .the elderly, the infirm, the mentally ill, the poor, the dark-skinned people, the gays, women, children after they leave the womb, the under educated, the under employed. . . well the list just gets longer and longer. For most Americans, there is some group or class of people that don’t deserve what they themselves have. These less deserving ones are expendable, even if there is a tinge of regret that it MUST BE DONE, it just must be done. It seems in their eyes, no one has a right to survive equal to their own.
It’s tribal. Our tribe is better than the other tribes. We need to kill off the other tribes because they are different from us. So much for evolution, eh?
We haven’t come very far in our growth here and when we become fearful, it is US FIRST and really no one else matters.
but in this case it goes a little deeper. Maybe the docs were heroic if they saved these patients from a long and miserable end. I don’t think we’ll ever be entirely comfortable with the rights and wrongs of that ultimate decision.
But in this case it wasn’t about a painful terminal disease or brain disintegration. It was about saving them from the consequences of US government’s abject failure to accomplish a bottom-line basic thing like evacuating the damn hospital.
I am not meaning to ignore the real matter of euthinasia here. And it may have been a kindness since whether we should have made an all out effort to evacuate hospitals or not was not in play. We didn’t. I personally think it is up to the individual who is about to die to make such a decision, not someone else. I have no problem with allowing people to make that decision on their own.
It is a very difficult question and I certainly do not have the answers beyond what I would want for myself.
Whoever made the decision NOT to evacuate the hospitals, are the ones I was refering to above as seeing some people as expendable.
I hadn’t quite understood what made this all so shocking until you hit the nail on the head: these people did not ask to be the beneficiaries of the staff’s “mercy”.
How would one have asked them? “Mrs. X, you are suffering in this heat and stink and sepsis and misery. It looks like nobody’s going to get you out of here. So do you want us to kill you now, or let you suffer longer until you die on your own?”
That’s what makes me so sick. A choice not really about natural tragedy but about the worst kind of incompetence and indifference on a scale we never thought could happen here. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to hear the phrase “Homeland security” without either laughing or screaming out loud.
…this current criminal government…Some elements of our society are expendable
Like those who have had problems getting their rx’s with Medicare D.