porkwithbones

"Angels of mercy," someone had called them. They were the ones who had stayed behind, in what was now a dying hospital: road access cut off by flood waters that wouldn’t recede for days, at least. Electricity on backup generators. They were getting patients and staff out on boats and in helicopters, and now they were talking about a solar flare — God alone knew how anyone got that news — that might take out all the electricity, even the generators, even the helicopters.

The patients on ventilators would suffocate within minutes, when that happened.

Suffocation was a very unpleasant death.

Doctors had been faced with this same situation, patients who could not be evacuated and would suffocate without care, in Katrina. And they had come to the same conclusion Jeanne was coming to now.

She wouldn’t ask any nurses to administer it. The guilt would be hers and hers alone. But she was prescribing a lethal dose of morphine for certain patients, to save them certain extended suffering as they died.

Sometimes, being an angel of mercy meant also being an angel of death.