LAT: Hospital Staff Tried to Comfort Dying Patients

Hospital Staff Tried to Comfort Dying Patients
By Solomon Moore, Times Staff Writer


NEW ORLEANS -- Describing a desperate and harrowing struggle to comfort dying patients as floodwaters rose and the city descended into chaos, hospital staffers from Memorial Medical Center said today that 45 people died there during a six-day vigil....

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"I can tell you it was 106 degrees in that hospital" in the days after the storm, (Dave Goodson, director of support services at the hospital) said. Goodson described the heroic efforts of doctors and nurses who comforted ailing patients — even fanning some to cool them.

Goodson said that their hopes rose when they heard helicopters coming toward them, but the patients weren't airlifted — instead, supplies and evacuees who had escaped their homes in nearby neighborhoods were dropped off....

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Goodson said that at one point, National Guardsmen came to the hospital and evacuated some patients and promised to come back for more — but then the floodwaters rose. They didn't return until Friday, Goodson said.

(Joanne Lalla, an oncology nurse) said that she "couldn't understand why nobody was coming to help us."...


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-091205hospital_lat,0,1944570.story?coll=la-home-headlines

This angers me like few issues ever have.

but they kept helping others. Bless them.

:thumbsup:

After spending way too much time trying to explain why people should think twice before believing the by now infamous British tabloid article (the one that claimed that doctors in New Orleans started offing their patients when the going got tough), it's good to see this article, sad as it is that the staff of Memorial Medical Center could not prevent death in every case.