From The Ramparts

A Gruesome Story

Gruesome Story

“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. Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana, and The Mail on Sunday is protecting the identities of the medical staff concerned to prevent them being made scapegoats for the events of last week.” - the Mail on Sunday UK 09-11-05

Just when you though things couldn’t get any worse or the reports more bizarre, now comes an article published in the Daily Mail for Sunday September 11, 2005 an English newspaper featured an article by CAROLINE GRAHAM and JO KNOWSLEY claiming doctors in New Orleans gave high dosages of morphine to patients in critical condition in a New Orleans hospital in order to expedite their deaths rather than allow them to die during Hurricane Katrina. The story does not name the physicians or the hospital but claims they staff was afraid of roving bands of drug fiends who were looting looking for a fix. The report made it seem as if the hospital staff was in dire danger of assault by looters, that power went out and they had numerous terminally ill patients on their hands and had to make life or death decisions as to who to dispose of and who to save. Only one staff member was quoted by name. The article states, “ 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.’ The rationale was that many of these people were going to die anyway so they simply speeded the process up. The article further stated, “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.’ The doctor, who finally fled her hospital late last week in fear of being murdered by the armed looters, said: This was not murder, this was compassion. They would have been dead within hours, if not days. We did not put people down. What we did was give comfort to the end. ‘I had cancer patients who were in agony. In some cases the drugs may have speeded up the death process. 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. It came down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity.”
I went to their Website /www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html? And read the article. Whether this article is true or not, I cannot say. Perhaps this paper is an Enquirer clone that prints exaggerated and bogus stories with doctored photographs. However if this is true it raises some serious questions about the ethics of emergency management, physicians and health care professionals. The slant of the article gives the impression the hospital staff was stressed out and pressured by fears of roving bands of looters trying to get at the drugs in the facilities pharmacy. Of course we have no way of know if this in fact was true but, in my mind it is similar to the ol’ “I was afraid for my life” excuse many urban police officers use when they shoot black males. What is says is even if the article is a hoax and fraud, black life or the lives of poor people are expandible and expedient. The unidentified doctor is quoted as saying she wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing, “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.’ The doctor, who finally fled her hospital late last week in fear of being murdered by the armed looters, said: ‘This was not murder, this was compassion. They would have been dead within hours, if not days. We did not put people down. What we did was give comfort to the end.’”
We may never know whether this story is real because the Bu$h administration is suppressing pictures and stories about recovery of bodies and just as they attempt to suppress graphic photos of the collateral damage of US weaponry in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is alarming to think euthanasia is going on especially when the doctors don’t even know if what they are doing is correct But white AmeriKKKa has a long history of similar atrocities and neglect in dealing with Africans in AmeriKKKa. Keep your eyes and ears open. Incidents like this may just be the tip of the iceberg.

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posted by Junious Ricardo Stanton @ 3:59 AM