Let the excuses begin.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) – Three days after Hurricane Katrina, the nursing director at Memorial Medical Center huddled with other officials outside the emergency room, surrounded by 10 feet of putrid floodwater.

Hundreds of people were stranded inside, the power was out and the toilets were backing up. With little security, anyone willing to carry a gun was deputized to watch the entrances. The nursing director reported that some patients were very sick and probably could not be evacuated with the rest of the hospital. What were they going to do?

You do everything you can to keep your patients comfortable and safe. You give the scrubs off your back when you need to.

On Tuesday, Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti alleged that a doctor and two nurses decided to administer lethal doses of morphine and a sedative to at least four trapped and desperately ill patients.

Dr. Anna Pou and nurses Lori Budo and Cheri Landry were booked on charges of being “principals to second-degree murder,” which carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison.

Court papers and interviews with people who were at Memorial after the storm paint a desperate picture filled with fear and potentially agonizing choices.

“It was stifling. We were hoisting patients floor to floor on the backs of strong young men. It was as bad as you can imagine,” said Dr. Gregory Vorhoff, who stayed throughout the storm and eventually hitched a ride on a boat to seek help.

Memorial Medical, he said, “had ceased to be a hospital.”

Ceased to be a hospital and turned into a euthanasia clinic? Or a morgue.

According to an arrest affidavit, Pou told a nursing executive on Sept. 1 that the sickest patients were probably not going to survive and that “a decision had been made to administer lethal doses.”

“Lethal does of what?” the executive asked.

Prosecutors say the injections contained morphine and a sedative called Versed. Pou had more than 25 vials. She asked for syringes and saline flushes, the affidavit said.

“You don’t have to participate. We’ll take care of it,” Foti quoted Pou as telling others.

Pou and the nurses allegedly then went to the bedsides of the four patients. Their bodies, along with 40 others, were retrieved by search teams 10 days later.

Those sick patients were going to die anyway, sadly. They should have allowed that to happen naturally. Instead of playing God.

The patients were severely ill – suffering from terminal cancer or on life support in many cases. They were surrounded by muddy water with no communication to the outside world for days. The patients even watched people break into a building across the street, Vorhoff said.

“People don’t understand the total breakdown of civilization,” he said.

It’s not an excuse for these well trained, educated medical people. No excuses are really going to change how I feel about this.

Others think like I do as well:

CHICAGO (AP) – Despite horrific medical conditions including triple-digit temperatures, no electricity and useless lifesaving equipment, ethicists and even some doctors caught in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath say there’s no way to justify killing a sick or dying patient.

“You’ve got at best mercy and panic, but that doesn’t add up to an excusable homicide,” said University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan.

No one knows if that happened in New Orleans, but a doctor and two nurses were arrested Tuesday on suspicion of murder charges. They are accused of giving fatal doses of morphine and a sedative to four patients stranded at a New Orleans hospital after the catastrophic storm last August.

The worst-case scenario would be if the doctors “tried to save themselves and didn’t want to feel guilty leaving the patients behind and killed them,” he said.

The best-case scenario, he said, would be if the accused “believed all possibility of maintaining people on technology has come to an end, you’re out of power and your battery power is running out and you say, ‘I can’t let these people suffer.’”

“Under American law, neither scenario would be excusable,” Caplan said.
[...]
Dr. Max Brito, a Chicago physician who was in New Orleans for a meeting when Katrina hit, had firsthand experience with desperate medical conditions there but said he can’t imagine resorting to mercy killings even in the direst of circumstances.

“I would never do that,” said Brito, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

He helped set up a makeshift clinic in the hotel where he was stranded. Patients included a boy trapped on a rooftop who was brought in with pneumonia. Nurses in the hotel crafted a stethoscope out of a paper cup to listen to his lungs.

“It was a tough situation,” Brito said. But even patients stranded in flooded hospitals eventually “would have gotten out of there.”

The situation wasn’t so dire “that someone would have to go to that extreme,” he said of the alleged killings.

Dr. Janis Tupesis of the University of Chicago went to Baton Rouge, La., shortly after the storm hit to work in a clinic set up in a convention center, treating patients “who literally escaped with the clothes on their backs.”

He said he learned later about the unbearable hospital conditions in New Orleans.

“It’s difficult to say what’s right and what’s wrong in that situation,” Tupesis said. “I can’t even imagine what kind of stress they were working under.”

Still, he said, “it would be difficult to see any circumstances where I think that would be OK.”

The doctors’ oath is to do no harm, and American Medical Association ethics say mercy killings or euthanasia are “incompatible with the physician’s role as a healer.”

Because the accused physician, Dr. Anna Pou, was an AMA member when the alleged crimes took place, the group’s ethics council will be monitoring the case and may carry out its own investigation to see if disciplinary action is warranted, an AMA spokesman said.

The AMA can do what it wants but the American justice system will take care of this.