A well-respected doctor who arrived in New Orleans to assist patients as Hurricane Katrina came near has been accused of murder along with two nurses.
Dr. Anna M. Pou and nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo have been charged with administering lethal amounts of morphine and a central nervous system sedative to several patients who they felt had no hope of surviving the Katrina crisis and subsequent evacuation.
We should not rush to judgment on these women. The circumstances they faced were impossible:
Overheated patients were dying around her, and only a few could be taken away by helicopter, the only means of escape for the most fragile patients until the water receded. Medicines were running low, and with no electricity, patients living on machines were running out of battery power…By Wednesday and Thursday, with New Orleans flooded, a credit union being looted across the street and gunshots heard outside, hospital staff members had concluded that some patients were simply not going to leave the building alive…[Pou's lawyer] said the sickest patients could not have been evacuated on the inflatable boats being used. And he said that to take patients to the roof for helicopter rescues, orderlies had to squeeze them through a 3-foot-by-3-foot hole in a hospital wall and push them on gurneys up the ramps of the parking garage before carrying them onto the roof…some patients also died while being transported under those conditions.
Modern society has no name for the desperation seen in Katrina’s wake. Before we judge these women, who if guilty as charged honestly believed they were doing the best they could for their sickest patients, let’s not forget the context in which these emergency life-or-death decisions were made. Honestly had I been terminally ill in that hospital without hope of surviving an evacuation I would rather have been euthanized than left to thugs and rats.
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