It’s been Ten Years now. . .

Does time go quicker from something good or something horrific?

It’s been 10 years since Hurricane Katrina

D  E  V  A  S  T  A  T  I  N  G

most likely isn’t a strong enough word. . .especially for what took place at Memorial Medical Center.

I’m going to ask this question Twice:

WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE?

The flood waters from Katrina had knocked out the power.  Doctors and Nurses were overstretched and overtired, patients were dying and the evacuation of many of the sickest seemed impossible.  Injecting drugs was one answer that some members of the medical staff decided on.  Were they trying to comfort those patients–or hasten their deaths?   (New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2009–Sheri Fink)

I know it’s long, but not as long as Sheri Fink’s book, FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL, published in 2013; She’s a physician as well as a writer and she takes a gawking-don’t-blink-look at the decisions doctors made at Memorial Medical Center, a hospital in New Orleans that was overwhelmed by the Hurricane.  The Doctors, who had lost electrical power and backup and were not supported by hospital owners who had no generator mechanic on staff or even an evacuation plan, were forced to make calculated decisions on which patients to actually save.  Some of those who were not expected to make it were shot up with morphine and left to die.  This was four days into a devastating hurricane where generators failed, the intensive care wing sweltered in darkness and chaos and gunshots rang out in the areas outside of the hospital.  Sheri’s book focuses on an attempt to prosecute a doctor and two nurses for homicide after an investigation showed elevated levels of morphine and other drugs in 23 patients who died at the hospital.  Of those, 20 were ruled homicides.

R E A D:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/30doctors.html?pagewanted=all

Was this Palliation–Comfort Care?

Was this Compassion?

Was this Assisted Suicide?

Let me ask you now, for the second time:

WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE?

Maybe the real question is:

W H A T

W O U L D 

Y   O   U

H A V E

W A N T E D

D O N E

I F

IT

W E R E

Y      O      U  

?