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.'” (Mail.UK)
Given that euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana, the paper has concealed the names of the doctor. Morphine in escalating doses is often given as a ‘comfort measure’, even if it hastens the end, when a patient’s death is judged to be inevitable and imminent. In this case, however, the imminence and inevitability may have been a function of the government failure to respond to the disaster promptly. Would you have done differently under the circumstances?
