Doc: I 'got rid of' patient after Katrina

[kpete]

Source: Associated Press

Doc: I 'got rid of' patient after Katrina

By MARY FOSTER (AP)

NEW ORLEANS — Louisiana's top prosecutor said Friday he will not reopen a probe into allegations of euthanasia at a hospital crippled by Hurricane Katrina, despite new statements from a doctor that he drugged a terminal patient to "get rid of her faster."

Dr. Ewing Cook said that as staff at Memorial Medical Center desperately tried to care for and evacuate patients, making spot assessments of which ones might survive, he scribbled "pronounced dead at" on the patient's chart, intending to fill in time and other details later.

"I gave her medicine so I could get rid of her faster, get the nurses off the floor," Cook told ProPublica, an independent nonprofit investigative organization, in a report to be published Sunday in The New York Times Magazine.

"There's no question I hastened her demise," he said.

Read more: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ihIz2BNe6PhkJfGQMahcpNZ4xedAD9AC4MQ80

[NJCher]

1. wow, some bedside manner this guy has

And I quote:

"I gave her medicine so I could get rid of her faster..."

I truly hope this 79-year-old has no surviving relatives who will read how a doctor viewed her--as someone to "get rid of."

He didn't have to phrase it like this. He could simply have said that the prospects for her survival were minimal.

The man's words are cruel beyond belief.

Cher

[bitchkitty]

4. Would you rather she drown, alone?

They couldn't get all of them out. Some could not be moved. Those doctors had to make some horrific choices in order to save patients' lives. I can't imagine the trauma for the families, but I think the doctors went through some emotional agony themselves.

[NJCher]

12. please re-read the post

Nowhere does it say anything about the action he took. My argument is strictly with how he expressed himself.

Cher

[anneboleyn]

15. Read the NY Times article. NONE of them were in any danger of drowning and a rescue team was there.

Read the article. Your speculations are not supported by the evidence provided in the NY Times piece.

[bitchkitty]

16. I read the OP's article.

Do you have a link to another one?

[anneboleyn]

18. There is an enormous thread about it on GD (Katrina story). I believe Neecy has the link in her post

at the start of the thread. A lot of us have been focusing on the case of Emmett Everett, who was not terminally ill or unconscious and was given a dose of morphine and then had his face covered with a towel (to smother him according to one witness).

[EFerrari]

20. Here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6408298

[EFerrari]

21. They were in no danger of drowning. n/t

[bitchkitty]

25. Just read the NYT article and I stand corrected.

Very sick and horrifying choices were made.

I blame the people who made the choices, but even more I blame the ones who made those choices necessary - especially George Bush, who strummed a guitar while people drowned.

[Louisiana1976]

2. Yet another trauma to come out of Katrina and the federal flood--

my heart bleeds for the victims' families who lost kinfolk in such a manner. Perhaps there should be a way the victims' survivors could mount a class-action suit against the doctors who killed their family members.

[LuvNewcastle]

3. A lot of people die like that --

by morphine overdose, I mean. They did the same thing with my grandfather. It was really the humane thing to do. I really don't like the way that doctor described the situation , though; it was a very poor choice of words.

[cali]

5. That's how my father died. I asked his doc to please give

him enough morphine to completely eradicate the pain he was suffering. I knew what I was asking. The doc knew. The nurses knew. It was a somewhat odd coded conversation. He asked me if I knew that upping the morphine would depress my dad's breathing. I made it clear that I did. My father was suffering terribly. I knew it was what he would have wanted. I'm glad that he was treated so humanely.

[malaise]

6. Hubby and I will do the same for each other

It is the only humane thing to do.

[moriah]

17. The words that we used with Dad in hospice was "maximum pallative care".

He was on a pump for the time he was conscious, and once he was unconscious when he was agitated he was given Ativan and Phenergan, and when he showed pain symptoms we were allowed to hit the button for him. While dying he developed pneumonia, and they suggested that we use the pump when he started getting short of breath or coughing, as it was a great cough suppressant and it was better to use it than to try to add another medicine to the regimen. We could hit it every half-hour, so at the end that's what we were doing.

But when I was still in Arkansas I told them if he couldn't speak for himself, then what he wanted was not another needle piercing his flesh unless it was to deliver pain medication -- that he would rather die of respiratory depression than suffer from the liver tumor that was, at that time, the size of a baby's head. He agreed 100% with my decision.

[anneboleyn]

19. The cases described in the NYTimes article are not "typical" euthanasia cases at all.

Especially Emmett Everett's case. It is long -- 18 pages -- but I wold recommend reading it because it raises very important questions about our health care system (I believe, anyway).

[HamdenRice]

7. I agree with upthread comments it was humane for doc to do. Bush's deliberate murder of NO was not

and it was putting these doctors in that situation that was a case of criminal mass murder. Some of us will never forget what the Bush administration did to New Orleans.

Orders are orders:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07navy.html?_r=1&oref=login

Navy Pilots Who Rescued Victims Are Reprimanded

By DAVID S. CLOUD
Published: September 7, 2005

PENSACOLA, Fla., Sept. 6 - Two Navy helicopter pilots and their crews returned from New Orleans on Aug. 30 expecting to be greeted as lifesavers after ferrying more than 100 hurricane victims to safety.

Instead, their superiors chided the pilots, Lt. David Shand and Lt. Matt Udkow, at a meeting the next morning for rescuing civilians when their assignment that day had been to deliver food and water to military installations along the Gulf Coast.

...

The two lieutenants were each piloting a Navy H-3 helicopter - a type often used in rescue operations as well as transport and other missions - on that Tuesday afternoon, delivering emergency food, water and other supplies to Stennis Space Center, a federal facility near the Mississippi coast. The storm had cut off electricity and water to the center, and the two helicopters were supposed to drop their loads and return to Pensacola, their home base, said Cmdr. Michael Holdener, Pensacola's air operations chief.

...

Seeing people on the roofs of houses waving to him, Lieutenant Udkow headed in their direction. Hovering over power lines, his crew dropped a basket to pick up two residents at a time. He took them to Lakefront Airport, where local emergency medical teams had established a makeshift medical center.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Shand landed his helicopter on the roof of an apartment building, where more than a dozen people were marooned. Women and children were loaded first aboard the helicopter and ferried to the airport, he said.

...

Recalling the rescues in an interview, he became so emotional that he had to stop and compose himself. At one point, he said, he executed a tricky landing at a highway overpass, where more than 35 people were marooned.

Lieutenant Udkow said that he saw few other rescue helicopters in New Orleans that day. The toughest part, he said, was seeing so many people imploring him to pick them up and having to leave some.

"I would be looking at a family of two on one roof and maybe a family of six on another roof, and I would have to make a decision who to rescue," he said. "It wasn't easy."

...


"We all want to be the guys who rescue people," Commander Holdener said. "But they were told we have other missions we have to do right now and that is not the priority."

The order to halt civilian relief efforts angered some helicopter crews. Lieutenant Udkow, who associates say was especially vocal about voicing his disagreement to superiors, was taken out of the squadron's flying rotation temporarily and assigned to oversee a temporary kennel established at Pensacola to hold pets of service members evacuated from the hurricane-damaged areas, two members of the unit said. Lieutenant Udkow denied that he had complained and said he did not view the kennel assignment as punishment.

In protest, some members of the unit have stopped wearing a search and rescue patch on their sleeves that reads, "So Others May Live."

[Chemisse]

9. Really unbelievable

I sincerely think the Bush administration viewed the residents that did not evacuate ahead of time - more likely to be underprivileged - as being less than human.

This was starkly evident in the first couple of days after the storm, when they talked about the city as though it were infested with criminals. They were ready to move in with troops, not to save anybody, but to stop looting.

[Selatius]

8. People don't understand how extremely extraordinary the situation on the coast was post-Katrina.

Everything was completely shredded. Many police officers simply ran away or abandoned their posts. There was no cell network; it was all destroyed. There was no running water. There was no national guard in many cases. Nothing was organized. Neither state or federal agencies were equipped or coordinated enough to do anything. People were left to wander and die, and many did. Bodies were left out in the sun for days. Other bodies were out in the water, and if they weren't recovered, they likely were swept out into the Gulf of Mexico.

I ought to know. I live on the Mississippi coast. Everything I knew was taken away.

I'm not going to defend anything the doctor did, but given the grim situation people were facing in those dark days, it would be hard to find people who are not weighing the cost of leaving somebody to fend for himself or herself vs. offering help and risk sinking themselves in the process. If the hospital in question was flooded out and had run short on medical supplies, it could have easily appeared to be a situation of letting them suffer and die a slow death vs. giving them a quicker, less painful way out. A heinous choice, but there was no guarantee that help would come in time, especially given the slow state and federal response.

[EFerrari]

24. The most troubling thing is that about 18 patients were injected

and died shortly after -- on a day when there were rescue missions running again. There was a problem with power and water up on the upperr loors but medical supplies didn't seem to be a problem. The police wanted to clear the hospital by 5 pm -- before nightfall. Some of the patients who died were not gravely ill and not elderly.

The staff translates a DNR order into a "do not evac" order and things went downhill from there. There is more than one wrongful death suit ongoing. :(

[nightrain]

10. very painful dilemma. I try to put myself in the MD's shoes, not sure how that wd go....

[knitter4democracy]

11. Hastened but didn't cause.

What he's saying is that she was dying and that she would die soon. Instead of leaving her to die in a horrific manner, he made the calculated decision to have her pass in a less painful, easier manner.

From the descriptions the doctors and medical staff have given, the conditions were hell. No power, so everyone on a respirator was being hand-bagged in shifts. In the dark. In the sweltering heat. There was no food, so the medical staff were giving each other IVs of ringers just to stay alive and awake enough to keep doing their jobs. The lower floors of the hospital had flooded, including the morgue, and they heard gunfire and all sorts of crazy stuff outside. They were given a short time to evacuate and told that, if they weren't ready and gone, they would be abandoned by the police entirely, as would their patients.

The cause of death here was what the patients already had and the government's horrifically awful response to Hurricane Katrina. The doctors and medical staff were doing the best they could. I for one refuse to judge them.

[EFerrari]

22. What?

'The cause of death here was what the patients already had and the government's horrifically awful response to Hurricane Katrina."

No. These people were euthanized. At least be honest enough to cop to that.

And if you "refuse to judge" that doctor, why are you fuzzing up the cause of death?

Disgusting.

[knitter4democracy]

23. There's a difference.

There's a difference between killing someone who's got plenty of life left and just in a lot of pain and ill and euthanizing someone who is going to die soon so that they suffer less.

When patients are euthanized in the hospital, the cause of death is put down as whatever they already had that was killing them. So, if they're dying from pneumonia, say, or cancer, the cause of death is the pneumonia or the cancer, as the doctor wouldn't have even thought of giving them that much morphine otherwise.

There's no way those patients would've died at that time under those circumstances if they'd been evacuated properly or if the generators hadn't flooded and help had arrived in a timely manner. That's not saying they wouldn't have died, though. They were dying. Most people in the unit or in step-down care don't come out alive. The vast majority don't. Those patients were dying, but if he left them there after he was evacuated, the doctor would've been committing malpractice by leaving them without medical care and to die alone. This way, the patients passed on in less pain and with people around them.

Look, I'm not saying all doctors should go out and euthanize everyone in the unit, for crying out loud. This was a horrific, hellish, terrible situation, and too damn many people died as it was. There was systemic breakdown everywhere, and people died for it--most of them needlessly. The people who died at the Superdome and on the overpasses, the people who drowned, the people who died in the nursing home, the people who died at the hospital--all of them could have been saved, and while their neighbors and loved ones did their dead-level best, what they really needed were those rescue choppers, that naval hospital ship offshore, the National Guard, and every resource our nation had at our disposal. Instead, they were left to die.

[truthisfreedom]

13. "Get rid of" is inflammatory wording. Not the best choice of words, doc.

These things are best handled with careful wording.

[Liberal_in_LA]

14. Yeah, wording is shocking