mercy July 18, 2006
Yahoo news has an A.P. article about the doctor and two nurses who were arrested on second-degree murder charges for euthanizing patients at Memorial Medical Center during the flood. There is a lot more in this article than in the one on nola.com. The Associated Press reporter has this:
Angela McManus said Tuesday that her 70-year-old mother was among the patients who died at Memorial. Her mother had been recovering from a blood infection but seemed fine and was still able to speak when police demanded relatives of the ill evacuate. She died later that day, McManus said.
“At least now I’ll be able to get some answers,” McManus said. “For months, I haven’t known what happened to my mom. I need some answers just to be able to function.”
The article states that the doctor, Anna Pou, and the two nurses, Cheri Landry and Lori Budo, were charged in the deaths of four patients at Memorial, where many more also died. It does not give the names of the four victims, so it’s not clear if the mother of the lady quoted above is one of them. There will be a press conference this afternoon, so maybe the details will be a little clearer.
Without knowing much, though, this just strikes me as very sad all the way around. It’s hard to imagine that a doctor and two nurses who stayed behind during a hurricane when many others left would turn out to be killer-types. It’s awful to imagine these people, who are probably very humane, getting to the point where they were isolated and desperate enough to decide that mercy killing was the best way to ease these patients’ suffering.
I have been with a few people at the point of their deaths, always in a hospital setting, and I have always been struck at the different ways the others present have reacted. Older people tend to accept the inevitable and rarely crack up or have unrealistic expectations unless the person who is dying is very young. Depending on the level of maturity, many people will make a bad situation worse by making it all about them. I’ve seen one situation where the person’s son demanded fruitless, desperate surgery at the end rather than letting is father go with any kind of dignity.
The most striking thing was when I went to the hospital to be with my grandmother when her brother died. His body was consumed by cancer and he was at the panting stage which I knew meant he was going. He was unconscious and being given massive amounts of morphine. I knew he was nearing the end. The hospital people came in rarely and the lights were very dim. His granddaughter, my cousin something-times removed, came up to me crying and said, “why don’t they do something? Why are the doctors just letting him die?” I realized that she didn’t understand what was happening, and she was a grown woman. I hugged her and said, “there is nothing they can do now.” She burst out wailing and I felt like shit. People just want their loved ones to be alive, no matter what that life might consist of. I was very glad that my grandmother and the other older relatives were making the decisions regarding her brother, rather than his granddaughter. In her loving ignorance and immaturity, she may have insisted on some pointless heroic measures.
I just watched the press conference and Charles Foti did not give any names or ages of the victims. He said that he believes they would have survived had they not been euthanized. Interestingly, Pou and the two nurses were booked, but not charged. Eddie Jordan’s office has to file charges, either through a Bill of Information or a Grand Jury Indictment, and that has not yet been done. I will be tough to convict these people of second degree murder, unless it is more craven than it appears. But if they are proven to have administered lethal drugs to patients, the families of the victims may have creditable wrongful death claims against the owners of the hospital.
This case does not present much of a legal dilemma, if Foti’s statements are correct. The law against killing people is pretty cleanly spelled out. The moral dilemma is another thing, though. I have tried to explain to those who love me that I do not fear death at all. What I fear is agonizing pain. I would make a very bad spy or mafiosa. The minute the torturers start using mean words with me, I will spill everything I know and then start making stuff up. I don’t believe it taking a Tylenol if I can just as easily take a muscle relaxer. If I ever come down with a painful terminal disease, the first thing I want to do is get addicted to the pain medication and stay that way.
As long as you can make your own decisions, you are good to go. Or stay. The problem comes in when your decisions are made by others. Even if you have a living will, you can’t legally instruct anyone to kill you. Well, you can instruct them to, but if they do they will be charged with murder. The most you can do is try to keep anyone from cutting on you or injecting you or bringing in those things that shock your heart back to life when it is time for you to go. I guess if your time to go arrives when you are sick, helpless, sweltering, miserable and evacuating in the middle of a shameful national disaster, with no family members to comfort you, there is nothing anyone else can do to change that. Not and get away with it.
- Posted in : main, new orleans
- Author : dangerblond
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