Thursday, October 13, 2005

Euthanasia only option with Katrina?

It would seem that the Hospitals and those who worked in them, felt they had very few options as Katrina moved ashore.


Reading the accounts is like reading fiction. It's amazing.



"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.



The doctor said: "I didn't know if I was doing the right thing. But I did not have time. I had to make snap decisions, under the most appalling circumstances, and I did what I thought was right.


"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."



"[We] did everything humanly possible to save these patients," the doctor King identified as holding the syringes to be used for the injections told CNN. "The government totally abandoned us to die. In the houses, in the streets, in the hospitals. ... Maybe a lot of us made mistakes, but we made the best decisions we could at the time."


 


You can read the story from the Daily Mail, and now CNN and World Net Daily.

3 comments:

  1. I only read your article Randall for the whole one may be too much to handle. I'm a med student. It upsets me that doctors would be deciding whose life had no value and then dispose of them. They use compassion as a defense and a reason for their actions, without really figuring through rationally what their actions mean. It is a case of shoot first and ask questions later.

    As a patient, how would you feel to be forced to place your life and care in the hands of someone who may determine unilaterally that ending your life is a valid option? It is a horrible nightmare.

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  2. Wow. My stomach turns. Who are we to decide when it is someone else's time to go? I wonder if the "good Doctor" can sleep at night.

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  3. Hmm, call me, uh, whatever you want, but I completely understand the doctors' decisions and while I don't necessarily agree with them, I can neither say that I would definitely not have done the same thing. I'm more shocked at the fact that a situation like that came up where they were forced to make such huge decisions.

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