9.12.2005

Louisiana Doctors: We Helped Our Sickest Patients to Die

Update: The Ingenius One forgot the link. Doh! I tell you, there are days when I'd qualify with a job with the Bushies I make so many mistakes. Thankfully, those days are relatively rare.

Heart-wrenching and published in England:

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."
And yet I know these doctors and staff will face incredible scrutiny for their decision. But can you imagine what it would be like to be dying anyway and then be forced through one of the messiest, most miserable evacuations ever?