re: Memorial Hospital after Katrina

Friend,

What is one to do, when keeping a patient alive in a state of constant misery and undignified conditions seems like harm in and of itself?

How does one wrestle with the ethical dilemma where it appears death is the only viable respite from their unbearable suffering?

“Harm” can take on many forms.

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a-hole killed his own career. The people of Louisiana sided with Dr. Pou and threw his arse out of office.

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His argument was that morphine + Versed is automatically fatal. It's actually common and doesn't kill patients.

One of the Tenet docs actually killed the patients. He told the NYT he suffocated a patient who wouldn't die. He was curiously not charged with anything.

I will never be able to prove this, but I remember hearing some EMT / male nurse type talking about euthanizing people on broadcast radio a few days after the storm... "doing what had to be done, etc."

At the time I remember thinking, "no, BS, you don't have to do that." It goes to show that what Pou and her colleagues did was pretty well-known and no one stepped in to stop it.

Someone should be held accountable for that, IMO. Pou skated, but I think any first responder who was aware of what was going on should be criminally liable.

First off, I've never seen any proof that NG officers threated patients or family members at gunpoint at Memorial.

Second, the reality is that NO ONE was properly prepared or trained for this situation. I'm not sure if anyone could have ever been prepared or trained for this, but clearly, they were not.

As such, I have a real difiiculty with blaming anyone for their actions if they truly thought their actions were trying to help people / save people / prevent even more suffering. (I do blame the people looting things such as televisions).

My SIL was a 20-something medical worker at the old hospital in the east and she was on the ride out team. 6 days after landfall, she got on a helicopter out of there. To this day, almost 20 years later, she refuses to discuss what she saw in those 6 days. And she is one of the mentally strongest people I have ever met.

The NG units that were here were made up of young men and women whose only life experiences were infantry in Afghanistan, etc. They were not prepared for what they had to deal with. You could see it in their eyes. And remember, at least initially, they were shorthanded because LANG had so many units on deployment overseas. It took a while to get reinforcements from other state NGs.

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I'd like to see that time line and how would you know what the Guard is capable of? Did you serve in the Guard????

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I did serve in the LANG and while I had been out for 15 years when Katrina hit, I can tell you without a doubt, in 1991 we were incapable of doing anything quickly or efficiently, especially in non-air guard units.

Just one example, our unit of the 769th had 8-10 2.5 ton trucks and at every single drill, we had at least half of them out of service. Every 3 months we had long drill weekends, usually involving a Friday night trip to Beauregard or Polk. We would report to New Roads at 5 pm and those trips never left within 2 hrs of scheduled departure and never took less than 5 hours. More often than not, we arrived and were not even unloaded before daylight Saturday. Mind you, these trips are scheduled a year in advance.

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the New Orleans area, particularly the city and St. Bernard Parish, must rightly have been considered under "wartime" conditions, certainly from the time the storm passed until sometime in November/December, at a minimum. Certainly folks who were there know what I'm saying.

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I had to go out and check on houses all over New Orleans and St Bernard after Katrina. Everyone I worked with who had to do this were armed. Some of our branches were in the middle of disaster areas, and once the power was on they moved employees into the branches. Police were virtually nonexistent. Very often cell phones weren't working other than possibly text messaging. So at least one person in every branch was armed.

The company caught wind of this, and sent a regional manager down to chastise us and tell us that company policy forbids firearms while conducting company business.

We took the regional manager on a tour of some of the worst areas, and showed him how we often had to go inside houses that may or may not have someone living there.

He told us that he will report back that we fully understand the company firearms policy, but off the record it was up to us how we decided to protect ourselves.

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And the ENGR units already had pre-scripted mission and area of responsibility. And NOLA was one of them

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Yeah, we had that too. In 4 years (relocation and offered early discharge), we never drilled for it once. Realize though, our unit was half 18 yr old college kids, half 35-40 year old 'Nam era guys hanging on for their twenty.

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Well I can tell you that when Katrina hit, every ENGR Guard unit was on lock down until after and also was still pending 256th's arrival back home from Iraq.

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I will defer to you on this, and have no reason to doubt you. I have been told by numerous other people, it was a different Guard altogether after 9/11. Thank God.

Friend,

You should always present the other side of the story as not to seem prejudice. The other side if you will.


LINK

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Only thing I remember about her is she has shark eyes. You don't see very many women with those kind of eyes.

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What does this mean?