by There have been rumors swirling since September 2005 that instead of evacuating bedridden hospital patients in the post-Hurricane Katrina aftermath, some doctors used lethal injections to euthanize patients who had previously signed DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) waivers.
Choosing not to leave behind those patients to the chance of a successful rescue or a certain death by starvation or drowning, the very doctors sworn to “First Do No Harm” shattered that covenant with a single plunge of a syringe. December 2, 2005, The Mercury News reported:
Authorities investigating whether hospital and nursing home patients were put out of their misery during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath are testing as many as 100 of the dead for lethal doses of morphine or other such drugs.
CNN said this on December 21, 2005:
Dr. Bryant King, a contract physician for Memorial who was working there when conditions were at their worst, told CNN exclusively that another doctor came to him at 9 a.m. on Thursday, and recounted a conversation that they had had with a hospital administrator. According to King, the doctor said that the administrator suggested patients be put “out of their misery.”When King objected, this physician acknowledged his concerns but said that “this other [third] doctor said she’d be willing to do it.” King said another hospital administrator asked if he and the two other remaining doctors should pray. King says one of those doctors, Dr. Anna Pou, had a handful of syringes. “This is on the second floor in the lobby. And across that walkway there is a group of patients and Anna standing there with a handful of syringes talking to patients,” he said. “And the words that I heard her say were, ‘I’m going to give you something to make you feel better.” “And she had a handful of syringes.
That was strange on a lot of levels. Number one, we don’t give medications; nurses give medications. We almost never give medications ourselves unless it’s something critical. Nobody walks around with a handful of syringes and goes and gives the same thing to each patient. It’s not how we do it.”
On February 16, 2006, National Public Radio broke this story:
According to statements given to an investigator in the attorney general’s office, LifeCare’s pharmacy director, the director of physical medicine and an assistant administrator say they were told that the evacuation plan for the seventh floor was to “not leave any living patients behind,” and that “a lethal dose would be administered,” according to their statements in court documents.According to eye-witness accounts, LifeCare’s pharmacy director said that later that Thursday morning, he found Dr. Anna Pou in the seventh-floor medical-charting room. According to his statement, Pou and two unnamed nurses informed him that it had been decided to administer lethal doses to LifeCare patients. From the court documents, it is not clear where the instruction came from. When asked what medication was to be given, the pharmacy director told the investigator from the AG’s office that Pou showed him a big pack of morphine vials. The LifeCare pharmacy director stated that, before evacuating, he saw Pou and the two nurses enter the rooms of remaining LifeCare patients.
On February 21, 2006 Not Dead Yet, a national disability rights organization opposing legalized assisted suicide and euthanasia responded to the NPR story:
…The only way the staff could evacuate was if they could report there were no more living patients to take care of. This was not about compassion or mercy. It was about throwing someone else over the side of the lifeboat in order to save themselves. In fact, this doesn’t look all that different from the abandonment of the 34 individuals in St. Rita’s Nursing Home in Bernard Parrish.In that incident, 34 people drowned after they were abandoned by staff. Death by drowning is easy to prove and so the owners of the nursing home are charged with 34 counts of negligent homicide. It’s unclear what will happen in the case of LifeCare medical staff. It’s hard to prove morphine medication overdoses in badly decomposed bodies.
NPR also shared how the human toll of Hurricane Katrina travels far beyond the dead and into the core of the living:
Angela McManus became seriously frightened for her mother when she overheard nurses saying a decision was made not to evacuate LifeCare’s DNR patients…. She tried to rescind her mother’s DNR order to no avail. On Wednesday evening, two full days after Katrina hit, Angela McManus says three New Orleans police officers approached her with guns drawn and told her she would have to leave. New Orleans police confirm that armed officers did evacuate non-essential staff from the hospital. Confronted by police, McManus raced to her mother’s bed.”I woke her up and I told her that I had to leave, and I told her that it was OK, to go on and be with Jesus, and she understood me because she cried,” McManus recalled. “First she screamed, then she cried. And I said, ‘Momma, do you understand?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ And she asked me, she asked me to sing to her one more time. And I did it, and everyone was crying, and then I left. I had to leave her there. The police escorted me seven floors down.” McManus says that when she left, only eight patients, including her mother, remained alive in LifeCare.
Two days later they were all dead. UPDATE: July 24, 2007
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – All charges against a doctor accused of murdering four patients in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have been dropped, U.S. prosecutors said on Tuesday. A grand jury in New Orleans decided not to pursue charges against Anna Pou, who was arrested along with two nurses from Memorial Medical Center on second-degree murder charges in June 2006.
I just can’t think of the words to describe how despicable those medical staff members are. I hope that somehow those persons responsible can be prosecuted, and I hope they will never be able to get a good night’s sleep living with what they’ve done.
I agree with you, Carla.
This was a planned exit in more ways than one — one for the doctors and another for the unwilling patients.
The crux of this mess is that the medical staff cannot abandon live patients — so you have a ward full of immobile patients with no way out and no food and no water and no power and the threat of rising floodwaters…
Do you stay and risk your life as a doctor for those will are likely to die anyway — or do you serve a higher purpose by sacrificing some lives now so you can save hundreds more over the remaining arc of your career?
This is a hard topic, David. There are so many “ifs” and “buts” that it’s hard to come to a decision on what to do and what happened. Should a doctor be required to not only suffer but die with patients?
I agree this topic goes to the core of who we are and what we believe and value and a society, soos.
Are doctors required to suffer and die with their dying patients? Or are doctors required to suffer and die with their patients who have no other ally in the world?
I’m not so sure it’s easy to decide who must suffer and when. While I don’t agree with the decision to inject patients with something that will kill them, I am not sure if it is wise to require doctors to die with their ill patients or to still require captains to go down with their ships for that matter. Isn’t there a point where cutting your losses and running for your life begins to win over a dying honor and a medical school oath?
You bring up a variety of critical questions, soos.
I don’t think ship captains should die with a foundering vessels but, I think, in the Katrina case described in today’s post — the doctors should have stayed and done everything possible to help their patients without resorting to the final solutions of lethal injection. They were safe from flooding on the 7th floor. They knew the New Orleans police were in the vicinity and aware of the hospital’s situation. While it would have been inconvenient to stay — it was the true and honorable path to take that day.
I think that is a hard case to make. In one of the articles you link today there were gunshots outside the hospital and overflowing sewage from the streets taking over the first floor. The hospital was a mess and fast becoming a cemetary for those still clinging to life. The NOPD pushed everyone out of the building because the situation was dangerous. Is it possible that injecting the morphine was the best way to “do no harm” — give them a peaceful death instead of a suffering one?
You are right the hospital was destined to be a place of death more than life, soos, but when doctors become the instrument for death instead of the means of salvation then we not only have a breakdown in the expected moral sanctity of those sworn to “FIRST do no harm” we also have a societal crises where all the other ugly issues of the world are given equal standing with living and they are all satiated by bad decisions made by doctors who choose to kill their patients when it is inconvenient to leave them alone alive.
The fact that the DNR was used as a cudgel to call a faster death instead of being used as a means to end a prolonged and needlessly suffering life is a clue to the mindset of those doctors who chose to pick and choose who lived and who died that day.
The DNR thing bothers me. I am really bothered that the daughter who tried to revoke her mother’s DNR was denied. That’s awful. Someone will pay for that denial.
Yes, that DNR revocation will come back to haunt many doctors and New Orleans institutions, soos. If morphine was used to kill patients and those patients were not on any sort of morphine regimen before their deaths, then any trace amount of morphine left in the two-week old decomposing bodies will be a telltale heart that evil was done and those who are guilty of the deaths will serve the rest of the arc of their careers in a cellblock and not in a hospital.
I guess there are more horrors out there to play out.
I fear you are right, soos.
The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina is unfortunately effervescent and ongoing.
Oaths are funny things, Dave. Not all doctors take the Hippocratic oath in the ancient or modern forms. Some take no oaths whatsoever! Others take oaths written by their medical schools. So the bond of “Primum non nocere” has no real universal tether in the law or in the standards of the community.
I think part of the reason the patients were killed was to leave behind no chance of survivors to testify against the horrors of the hospital in the hours where humans tempt the domain of the Gods and decide who lives and who dies.
In the mix of it, New Orleanians felt they were not in the Last Days, but in the last seconds of the Last Days — animal instinct took over the street and previously cogent minds and “Survival of the Fittest” became the new universal oath of choice.
I don’t know the racial or socio-economic makeup of those who were killed — but they were likely poor minorities — because killing the wealthy majority means those doctors would have been euthanizing “their own kind” and thus would have beckoned future perpetual peril with the threats of surviving families and their pending lawsuits. To kill your own cultural icons is a festering mess that would haunt the evildoers until the end of time.
There are witnesses, though, like Angela McManus — as close an eyewitness to the murders if there ever was one — and pressing her away will not be a blood simple task for the lighthearted or the diligent.
I wonder if things have changed throughout the medical profession to address the need to be able to evacuate people during times of emergencies?
To be given a lethal injection because someone failed to plan ahead is a sad indictment of our medical profession. While it might have been more costly than an injection of morphine, there could have been provisions made before hand to evacuate patients. The storm happened in an age of satellite images, storm warnings, and 24-hour coverage of the hurricane. People knew New Orleans could flood — emergency planners had predicted the same scenario in a drill prior to the event. It seems to me that there should have been plans to move patients to higher ground when flood waters threatened, rather than giving them a lethal injection.
Prisoners on death row in California get better treatment by the medical profession — no doctor would administer the lethal injection for a recently scheduled execution. Too bad some in our medical profession think more of convicted killers than they do of the poor, the elderly, and the infirm stuck in a hospital after poor planning trapped them there.
I find it interesting also that many of the stories of the apocolypse occuring in New Orleans later turned out to be false.
From the Washington Post:
“Five weeks after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, some local, state and federal officials have come to believe that exaggerations of mayhem by officials and rumors repeated uncritically in the news media helped slow the response to the disaster and tarnish the image of many of its victims.
“Claims of widespread looting, gunfire directed at helicopters and rescuers, homicides, and rapes, including those of “babies” at the Louisiana Superdome, frequently turned out to be overblown, if not completely untrue, officials now say.”
I wonder if false reports made by breathless and tired reporters contributed to the feeling the end was seconds away? Could prejudice against the poor and minorities made predominately white reporters believe wild stories that later turned out to be false?
Could prejudice against the poor, infirm and disabled also lead them to their destruction at the hands of those who should have been their saviors?
It’s a sign that we must be vigilant and remember “Never Again.” Human nature as we learned when we read about Eli’s Blue Tattoo can turn brutish and evil when we stop thinking of people as being people.
Hi Chris!
All hospitals have evacuation plans but few of those plans consider roads that are inaccessible and completely blocked exits — the claim they are making about Hurricane Katrina is that she was a storm of such magnitude and vengeance there was never enough time to place those standard evacuation plans into action.
Much like 9/11 redefined the needs of the war on terror, so too, did Katrina redefine the way hospitals have to think about caring for really ill people when the hospital is cut off from the rest of the world.
I agree Death Row patients are treated better than those who were killed in New Orleans hospitals.
I think it is going to take a mandated federal oversight for the coordinated operational control over the evacuation of hospitals and nursing homes (AND ANIMAL SHELTERS!) in times of natural and created crises. It should be the primary job of the National Guard and the Army to go in and save those who are unable to save themselves and if we can’t manage that simple task then what kind of country have we become?
Dave —
I’m sure Angela McManus feels the prick of being the sole survivor and witness to her mother’s killing every day and you better bet there are elements out there who would love to see her quietly go away in any way necessary. She was brave to go to NPR. She could have probably better ensured her future by allowing herself to be paid off by the participants and then just slide away into the unwilling footnotes of history.
Chris —
I know there are a lot of stories about the Superdome. Some think there can be a mass hypnosis brought on by shared group hysteria — “We heard a bang! It must be a gunshot!” — in order to forge quick bonds between strangers who must come together to seek survival.
I have also heard reports from too many respected sources that there were looters and lots of gunplay in the streets — so there may be some cross-contamination of purposes between place and time and news and suppression — and it is all made absolutely plausible by the cause of confusion and lack-of-sleep that bends reality in mysterious ways.
I agree we need to learn from New Orleans to make sure that unreality is never repeated — but I feel the glow of varnish already being swabbed over the city in the mainstream media in the aftermath as “Po’ Folk Gone Wild” — while the real causes of the crises… bad city planning, poor FEMA responsiveness, outdated evacuation plans… are all ignored as official fingers point elsewhere to pick out the blame.
I find it interesting that the patients were on the 7th floor with LifeCare. I don’t know much about that company, but I wonder if it is one of those modern creations that leases hospital space and provides the services within the hospital? It seems that those types of organizations are ruthlessly cost conscious, whereas a regular hospital entity is more likely to incur losses when treating patients.
I wonder how much of a cost-benefit analysis was made in making the decision to give patients a lethal injection, instead of attempting to undertake heroic effort to evacuate along with the rest of the hospital.
Chris —
NPR said this about LifeCare:
Memorial Medical Center leased the floor to LifeCare Hospitals, a separate long-term patient care facility.
So it looks like it was an entity leasing space from the hospital.
I, too, wonder about the cost-benefit — I think those who did the injecting were only thinking about their futures and not the lives they were ending.
Here’s some information about LifeCare, the hospital mentioned in the news articles.
LifeCare’s home page states:
“LifeCare Hospitals has designed a new type of hospital specifically created to provide critical care and therapy services, producing better outcomes at a lower cost.” Emphasis added.
http://www.lifecare-hospitals.com/Default.htm
“It is gratifying to work with a team of professionals who succeed in balancing managed care and optimal care.” Emphasis added.
http://www.lifecare-hospitals.com/insurance.htm
The New Orleans hospitals are located inside of other hospital entities. http://www.lifecare-hospitals.com/Our_Hospitals_NewOrleans.htm
It’s the future of health care! Balancing between optimal and managed care!
Chris —
Your research links are haunting and I thank you for posting them. We’ll see if the death of Angela’s mother has any motivation on helping clean up the bottom-of-the-barrel bottom line of some managed care facilities.
I had no idea that this happened.
Reading this made me want to cry.
Hi Miss Kimberly —
It makes me cry too.
Thanks for sharing your feelings with us on this awful matter.
Talking about these killings gives the dead a whole new and important life.
Hi Miss Kimberly —
It makes me cry too.
Thanks for sharing your feelings with us on this awful matter.
Talking about these killings gives the dead a whole new and important life.
I am just dumbstruck by the post.
I don’t know how to react, the only question that comes to my mind is we claim we are ‘’civilized’’???
I am just dumbstruck by the post.
I don’t know how to react, the only question that comes to my mind is we claim we are ‘’civilized’’???
You ask an important question, Katha, that we must always ask in the face of the dead and dying: Was your life salvageable? Did we do everything we could to save you? Was your quality of life acceptable?
You ask an important question, Katha, that we must always ask in the face of the dead and dying: Was your life salvageable? Did we do everything we could to save you? Was your quality of life acceptable?
This is the kind of thing I expect from the Hospital where I gave birth to my children, the same hospital that almost forced me into a metal brake down due to their disgusting treatment of patients. I clearly remember new mothers begging for painkillers and being laughed at by staff. But anyway, this isn’t the kind of thing I would have expected from any normal hospital. But that’s just it isn’t it, this wasn’t your normal every day situation. I’m not giving any excuse for this behaviour, I would have stayed and held the hand of the last dieing patient, but that’s me.
This is the kind of thing I expect from the Hospital where I gave birth to my children, the same hospital that almost forced me into a metal brake down due to their disgusting treatment of patients. I clearly remember new mothers begging for painkillers and being laughed at by staff. But anyway, this isn’t the kind of thing I would have expected from any normal hospital. But that’s just it isn’t it, this wasn’t your normal every day situation. I’m not giving any excuse for this behaviour, I would have stayed and held the hand of the last dieing patient, but that’s me.
Hi krome.obsession —
You’re in New Zealand, right? Is that where you had that terrible hospital experience? If so, it seems this might be an international intentional healthcare cabal to just barely do enough to stay in business by doing barely enough for the patients entrusted in their care.
Hi krome.obsession —
You’re in New Zealand, right? Is that where you had that terrible hospital experience? If so, it seems this might be an international intentional healthcare cabal to just barely do enough to stay in business by doing barely enough for the patients entrusted in their care.
I was in New Zealand, now I’m somewhere in the middle of nowhere. That’s what I get from having a stalker that works for the government. But yes, it was in New Zealand that I was treated that way. To be completely honest, I swore if I even got pregnant again that’d I’d rather squat on the side of the road. I really wonder how hospitals get away with the mistreatment of patients, but I know how. When you’re pregnant everyone brushes you off as being hormonally deranged, I’m sure theres endless ways others are brushed off. How does this relate to those poor people in this issue? I’m sure the doctors have some way of brushing it off and justifying what is a horrific act.
I was in New Zealand, now I’m somewhere in the middle of nowhere. That’s what I get from having a stalker that works for the government. But yes, it was in New Zealand that I was treated that way. To be completely honest, I swore if I even got pregnant again that’d I’d rather squat on the side of the road. I really wonder how hospitals get away with the mistreatment of patients, but I know how. When you’re pregnant everyone brushes you off as being hormonally deranged, I’m sure theres endless ways others are brushed off. How does this relate to those poor people in this issue? I’m sure the doctors have some way of brushing it off and justifying what is a horrific act.
Hiya krome.obsession!
It’s strangely comforting to know the New Zealand health system is just as broken as the American health system. I guess awful knows no national boundaries, eh?
I’m sorry to hear about your terrible experience and I hope it doesn’t get repeated in your lifetime!
Hiya krome.obsession!
It’s strangely comforting to know the New Zealand health system is just as broken as the American health system. I guess awful knows no national boundaries, eh?
I’m sorry to hear about your terrible experience and I hope it doesn’t get repeated in your lifetime!
This was the repeat, I had problems with both births. Not because of the births but because of the hospital. I have been to a LOT of different hospitals in NZ due to my medical problems, and none of them have ever been as bad as that one. They boast an emergency room waiting average time of over seven hours. When I was in there with my son their was a woman there who had been in critical care for three months because the doctor doing a tubal cut her bowels. This may be comforting to you, but it’s more than a little upsetting to me. America may be the great last hope for me to get surgery, and if they are no better than here I don’t know what my options are.
This was the repeat, I had problems with both births. Not because of the births but because of the hospital. I have been to a LOT of different hospitals in NZ due to my medical problems, and none of them have ever been as bad as that one. They boast an emergency room waiting average time of over seven hours. When I was in there with my son their was a woman there who had been in critical care for three months because the doctor doing a tubal cut her bowels. This may be comforting to you, but it’s more than a little upsetting to me. America may be the great last hope for me to get surgery, and if they are no better than here I don’t know what my options are.
When I said “comforting” it was tongue-in-cheek.
When I said “comforting” it was tongue-in-cheek.
Note to self, I should wake up before posting :”>
Note to self, I should wake up before posting :”>
Ha!
😀
This story of human rights violation is not merely limited to one particular incident. This is a serious sign of the sort of evil that is perpetuated in the world today. At the same time that all these people were dying I was being tortured in a hospital on the verge of lethal overdose myself. However, I was in an entirely different part of the world – the other side of the country.
What this is saying is that this is a national problem. It is not limited even to the united states. More and more drug companies involved with world government are charged in International Court for Crimes Against Humanity. These people are sinister and the actions they engage themselves take on the same salty flavor.
It is not long before people will have no rights even in their own homes and offices against these type of illegal detainments and homocides. elimenating the appearances of mental hospitals patients are inoculated with chemical straightjackets that serve similar agendas.
It is clear that from every legal standing these practices are illegal. Originally it makes perfect sense that if you can be detained without probable cause and involunatrily commited to illegal and fatal treatment, you must assume that these institutions would take everything else away.
What this becomes is a state of war. If, for example a burglar enters your home – you have the right to shoot him. Similarly in this type of situation you should be able to protect your life from the law.
Unfortunately there is no human being who will ultimately be able to help you. So that is why the evil must be removed…carefully.
If you consider the government in its sinister aspect you will realize that there is nothing to trust at all. Even if you had the law on your side mostly you will still loose. If you even go to the U.N. you could be assasinated or tortured.
Obviously, one has a chance of survival in the very small interval of hesitation…that is like the point of destruction of a death star. Even though the target is very small its very existence guarantees the objects entire destructibility.
Sometimes governments vote based on the people’s opinions favorably, like in the recent court decision of the Guantanomo Bay. However, these are not to be considered actual good signs – they are demons because the basis of the government is sinful there is always someone who will lie. Also we find that there are those who tell the truth and it is a battle we find.
The governement is not ultimately bad, in that its evil can be overcome in an instant. This can, if done correctly, by a single individual, disrupt the entire structure of the world. Consider Jesus.
A normal person should also try to do things actively to renounce the current government and evil while also accumulating good deeds. This can be done by writing letters and learning about these things.
This life is considered the final incarnation. All of people’s illusions will be finally annihlated and they will understand where all their misconceptions originated from. They will see that the source of all power is in the Lord, Jesus – even Love. His wisdom will overcome the earth. Man’s own wickedness shall condemn him. He is already here. Anyone who does not believe in Him is the devil since he has proved himself. This is a direct perception.
How was the hospital or the police or National Guard going to force the medical staff to stay in the hospital against their will until there were no more patients to care for? If any euthenasia occured, it does not make any sense that it occured in order to facilitate evacuation of the medical staff. Dr. Bryant King, who has been very vocal in his report of what he observed regarding Dr. Anna Pou, said he got in a boat and left after he allegedly saw Dr. Pou carrying around the mysterious syringes. No one stopped him from leaving, and he apparently had no ethical qualms about leaving. Is Life Care a hospital based hospice facility? Were they hand bagging the vent patients 24 hours a day. No telemetry, no refridgeration, no fresh sterile supplies. Did they have adequate clean drinking water or IV fluid? What was the logic behind the police forcing Ms. McManus’ daughter to leave at gunpoint? Obviously, we have no idea what really happened at this point. It will be interesting to hear the testimony of the accused doctor and nurses, and see what was documented in the patient chart.
Thank you for your interesting comment, Lisa!
I agree with Lisa. Post-Katrina was one of the scariest, most horrifying experiences I have ever had – and I was in downtown DC on 9-11. While this was happening, I was in Baton Rouge working in the call center for one of the other New Orleans hospitals (I won’t say which). The doctors and nurses ran out of food and water on Wednesday – the evacuations didn’t come until Friday night. The entire time, nurses were having to take turns hand-pumping the ventilator. The heat alone was claiming most of the patients’ lives. During one evacuation attempt, people on the streets were firing gunshots at the helicopter because it wasn’t coming to get them instead. No one knew when help would arrive. It was supposed to come on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. It never came! These doctors and nurses stayed for days and days doing everything they could for their patients. They starting administering IV drips to themselves to stay alive.
These people’s jobs are to save lives. They are human beings too. Who can say what decision you would have made in the same situation? Why did NO ONE else there speak out against what happened, if they all didn’t know in their hearts that maybe it was the right thing to do.
I’m not saying it was. All I’m saying is, how can we, who were not there, experiencing this intense trauma for ourselves, fearing for our own lives, judge these people?
Health care in this country is now managed by a group of insurance and risk management companies. The goal is not ensuring the best health care for everyone but rather the most adequate insurance for the largest number of people. Like everything else, it’s a numbers game. The really healthy pay the premiums and receive very little return. The average joes pay their premiums and receive a routine payback. And the really ill, usually those who couldn’t afford the premiums when they were healthy enough to be treated cheaply and easily, get the bare minimum Band-Aid approach.
No, I’m not laying blame for the horrendous acts in New Orleans on the insurance companies. They are just doing what they have been allowed to get away with. The blame in this situation will always remain that of the person holding the syringe. Taking a life is something that, while we many of us theorize about how we could do it, most of us would never have the ability to carry out.
So what do the insurance companies have to do with all of this? Maybe, collectively, groups like this (in every work environment) have continually shoved “cost effectiveness” and “value” down our throats for so long that we tend to view a human life in terms of what value they ultimately have? In some respect, our culture has bred, and continues to breed, denizens (or so we ferverently hope) that are able to coldly do the calculations and personally take care of the bottom line. We value money, power, status, and ourselves. We are generally, an apathetic and rather selfish nation. We react only to situations that are so heinous that silence would condemn us.
It’s absolutely right for us to be appalled by the events surrounding Katrina but at the end of the day, are we going to rise as one and really do something about it so this doesn’t ever happen again? H*ll, if we won’t tell the neighbor’s kids to knock it off when they are screwing up because we are afraid of being sued, are we really going to hold someone else to a higher standard?
“For evil to triumph it is enough only that good men do nothing”. Edmund Burke
Maybe it’s time for us to all examine our own hearts to see if we contribute to the dwindling bottom line of what humanity really is?
[Note: This comment was edited for content by David W. Boles.]
Two things- First of all, it’s hard to believe that it’s Anna Pou that did this. We here think she must have really had her back against a wall to think that way (if indeed that’s what she was thinking).
Secondly, I probably took care of that patient that was shot at during the transport, here on the receiving end. The person was traumatized, to say the least.
Amazing.
I am absolutely disgusted with how hungry for entertainment the American public has become. I have worked with Dr. Anna Pou and there is no possible way that she administered anything to any patient with the intent to do harm or euthanize. The media and now the Louisiana District Attorney have bought this fish tale hook, line and sinker. This is the rumor mill at its absolute worst. Everyone involved in this should all be ashamed. This is a fine physician who has dedicated her entire life to saving and helping others. But it doesn’t matter that she is innocent…she has already been found guilty in the PRESS. And you have helped by buying in to this contrived fantasy. If anyone in this deserves to be investigated, it is Tenet Healthcare. I have never heard of anything so utterly ridiculous…that an edict was handed down that patients on such and such floor shouldn’t be left alive. My god, this is a fabrication out of a D-rate Hollywood script. Back in the real world, we are in the process of losing decades of training. Do you think ENT surgeons of her caliber just drop off of tree limbs. No, as a society we make substantial investments to help people train for years and years and years to eventually be able to perform the services, she performs. This is the real disaster of Katrina that gossip mongers and rumor makers have destroyed a valuable and experienced physician. By the way, how many other healthcare workers are being investigated for abandoning their jobs and their patients. Dr. Pou didn’t. How about Dr. Bryant King, the accuser. He wasn’t around to help patients was he.
Oh and by the way…morphine and versed aren’t a so-called “LETHAL” combination. This is more trash-talk from the district attorney himself. This and other combination sedations are used across this nations in hundreds of hospitals every single day. It’s called moderate sedation and it is used frequently to help patients cope with pain and discomfort. I have performed hundreds of day procedures giving multiple doses of fentanyl (morphine like) and versed to patients to allow them to undergo the inventional procedure and lower their discomfort and pain. We have on occasion substituted morphine for fentanyl. Never had a patient die on us with that “LETHAL” combination.
Just stop and put your thinking caps on. Dr. Pou is in the business of saving and extending lives. She has practiced it for a long time. She chose to stay with the patients. Dr. Pou does not deserve what is happening to her now. Don’t let those who need to be investigated shift blame for untimely deaths to someone we need.
T. Bell.
whatever happened to “innocent until proven guilty?”
I am a physician who has worked personally with Dr. Pou and have found her to be one of the most dedicated and caring physicians I have ever encountered. I was also in a hospital (not Memorial) during the storm and contrary to what Dr. King (who I also know) thinks – MDs do administer meds.
During the crisis of that time there was no delineation of roles. Everyone worked together for one common goal. For patient care, comfort and eventual evacuation. I personally administered meds, started IVs and transported patients.
So, when Dr. King states “Number one, we don’t give medications; nurses give medications. We almost never give medications ourselves unless it’s something critical. Nobody walks around with a handful of syringes and goes and gives the same thing to each patient. It’s not how we do it.†this is wrong. I think that those who left their patients should be the ones undergoing investigation not those who helped.
JF
I researched Dr. Pou’s bio on line. She certainly has sterling medical credentials from what I saw.
If Dr. Pou did administer morphine to critically ill end of life patients who were suffering from sepsis, hypoxia, renal failure, dehydration, and starvation because of the lack of functional equipment and supplies available in the hospital after Katrina, I hope I would have had her courage. If she made an error in judgement about when and how death or salvation would come to these critically ill patients if she did nothing, she can easily be forgiven. I can see giving morphine and other drugs to help patients sleep painlessly through their suffering, and if a lethal dose was inadvertently administered Dr. Pou could easily be forgiven, and in fact applauded for her bravery.
There is no clear difference between a fatal and a theraputic dose of morphine or other narcotics and sedatives.
This thread is now closed due to comments flooding.
Those of you who have posted here in the last 24 hours would have been much more believable if you had used your real first and last name, stated your affiliations up front and if you had come here a month ago or even a week ago to press these points.
Your timing is obvious and suspect and suggests disingenuous intent and for those reasons your comments here will no longer be published: