[OYINDAMOLA AJIBOLA]

1. The New York Time Magazine ethics columnist’s statement questioned the hospital’s preparedness, The Tenet, and the Government should have prepared ahead of the storm, to evacuate the patient when they knew the storm was coming. The most important ethical question sometimes was the one they ask not at the moment of crisis when the government can predict what going to happen, the health professionals euthanized patients rather than abandoned those who couldn’t be moved when proper preparation was not made, though they were supposed to predict the crisis as well to avoid it rather than the catastrophe, at least on a local level, from the component particulars, including the political, cultural, and social forces preventing adequate safeguard against such crisis, the culture they live in does not want doctors killing to be very clear about that. But they might be able to make a defense of a mercy killing, if they will, under very extenuating circumstances.
2. John Thiele’s perspective of the storm and circumstances at Memorial was that he was sure the three patients who were too sick to be moved wouldn’t survive a trip to safety. He insisted on helping and gave the patients a shot of morphine and midazolam; the doses were higher than those he normally used in the ICU. He held their hands and reassured them, “It’s all right to go”. Most patients died within minutes of being medicated but the heavyset black man with the labored breathing hadn’t died. Thiele gave an additional shot of morphine, he thought 100 mg could work on him, but the man kept breathing. His circulation was so poor that the drug wasn’t getting to him, he covered his face with a towel, and he remembered it took then a minute for the man to stop breathing and die. It had gone against every fiber in his body to smother the man. It was something he had never thought he would ever have to do in any circumstance. Though he’d felt what he had done was right, immediately afterward the question of whether it was indeed right continued to play in his mind.
3. According to Virginia Rider harbored a similar moral outrage, about what happened at Memorial was wrong. It was as basic as the tenets of her Catholic religion, but she wasn’t a rigid thinker. She could understand that some people in some circumstances would want to be euthanized, but she had no problem with the illegal acts of the then-imprisoned Dr. Jack Kevorka, who had built a killing machine and helped patients die but she believe the difference was that they had requested his services, the doctors at Memorial, as far as Rider knew, had acted without consent.
Schafer was also raised Catholic, like Rider, and he also was not an absolutist on matters of life and death. As an attorney, he had drawn up living wills for many people who wished to document their end-of-life preferences in advance of any problems. He had done this for himself after getting older and thinking more about the issue. He wanted that life-supporting plug pulled, that was his decision, and he did not want someone else making it for him. While he felt it wasn’t his place to form opinions given their medical conditions, he could understand why some of the patients at the memorial had given the drug.

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