The writer is a Registered Nurse in Los Angeles, California.
Three healthcare providers who volunteered to stay with patients at New Orleans Memorial Medical Center during the desperate days of Hurricane Katrina have been accused of four counts of second-degree murder. The state is alleging that they took the lives of terminally ill patients in a long-term care unit at the hospital. The accused have not yet been formally charged.
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In the terrible days of Katrina, federal, state and local governments criminally abandoned thousands of stranded people in New Orleans, leaving them to die on rooftops and even flooded hospitals.
While there was little or no government aid coming to New Orleans residents, Dr. Anna Pou, a distinguished ear, nose and throat specialist, and two nurses, Lori L. Budo and Cheri Landry, refused to evacuate the hospital in order to stay with the patients.
They stayed in the most difficult conditions to provide care and comfort to those who were too sick to be evacuated—temperatures soared to over 100 degrees, toilets backed up, and patients lay in beds surrounded by muddy water. In that chaotic environment, the healthcare workers struggled without sleep or food to care for the patients. They did not have power, telephones, clean water or sufficient medical supplies.
‘Blame the government’
Across the United States and the world, physicians, nurses and others are expressing their outrage at the decision by the state of Louisiana to prosecute these healthcare providers.
“This is vilifying the heroes,” said Dr. Daniel Nuss, who supervises the accused doctor, Anna Pou, at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center. “I think it’s presumptuous for the attorney general or anyone else to try to assign blame for what happened under such desperate circumstances. By personal accounts from nurses, doctors, administrators, and support personnel who had worked with her in the months before Katrina, her work during the
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Nuss continued, “With other dedicated doctors and nurses, who worked without sleep or nourishment, at great self-sacrifice, she prevented further loss of life and has been credited with saving multiple people from dying.”
Another physician, Dr. L. Lee Hamm of Tulane University School of Medicine, stated that the blame for the suffering lies with those who were not there, namely government officials. “If you want to prosecute, if you want to know who is responsible for people dying, it’s the people who were not here.”
Dr. Pou and the nurses are accused of administering lethal doses of Versed, a tranquilizer, and morphine to control pain. These two drugs are commonly used to ease pain and provide comfort to those who are suffering.
Every medical worker knows that the correct dosage is very specific to each patient, depending on many factors such as weight, height, degree of pain and agitation, respiratory status, and so on. Therefore, finding levels of these medications postmortem cannot automatically establish any malevolent intent on the part of the physician. To the contrary, these medications were probably among very few options available to the doctors trying to ease the terrible suffering of the patients, who lay abandoned and trapped in the devastated hospital.
Rather than taking lives, as the state alleges, Dr. Pou and the nurses were struggling to preserve life and maintain the dignity of the patients.
To deflect further anger from people everywhere over the scandalous lack of response from the government during Katrina, the authorities in New Orleans and Louisiana are trying to place blame on three health-care workers who were trying to save patients left to die by a government that had abandoned them.
