More than a week later, the bodies of 45 patients were recovered from Memorial Medical Center’s makeshift morgue, per The Washington Post. “Some of the doctors told me that they walked around the hospital, had a look at the situation of the patients and felt that hastening death was the right choice,” Fink explained to NPR in 2013 of the so-called “mercy killings.” More specifically, according to multiple witness accounts, doctors and nurses allegedly injected numerous patients with lethal doses of painkillers, including morphine, until they passed. 1 - and as the hospital took on feet of floodwater - doctors allegedly determined that hastening the deaths of those too weak to evacuate would be the most humane decision.
They also designated the sickest patients with do not resuscitate orders as the final evacuees.Ī few hours after Memorial’s power failed on Sept. According to Fink, the doctors agreed to save babies first, followed by the intensive care unit patients whose lives depended on electricity. Anna Pou (played by Vera Farmiga in the Apple TV+ series), faced the ethical dilemma of prioritizing the order in which patients should be evacuated. Adapted from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sheri Fink’s book of the same name, Five Days at Memorial revisits how a small group of doctors decided, in some cases, which patients would live and who would die, amid a haphazard evacuation effort.Įarly on, hospital staff, including the highly respected Dr. In the days after the Category 5 storm made landfall on August 29, 2005, Memorial Medical Center lost power as backup generators failed and temperatures soared to over 100 degrees. Based on actual events, Apple TV+’s Five Days at Memorial gives a behind-the-scenes account of what happened at one New Orleans hospital in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
0 kommentar(er)
