Tales of the Weird – A Vet Weighs in On Katrina Hospital Killings

You can’t make up stuff like this.

Having been on the “assisted suicide/euthanasia/better dead than disabled” beat for more years than I want to recall, I get to the point where I figure I’ve seen just about every ridiculous thing that could possibly be thrown into the pro-euthanasia mix.

Boy, was I wrong.

Meet Dr. Patrick Mahaney, veterinarian and “certified veterinarian acupuncturist.” (BTW, I’d urge anyone considering an acupuncturist for their pet read this article at “Science-Based Medicine” first.

Acupuncture isn’t what drew my attention to Mahaney, though.  It was a post he published on August 28 titled “Veterinarian Perspective on Human Euthanasia During Hurricane Katrina“.

(Not Dead Yet weighed in on the Katrina killings at Memorial – see this post about the botched presentation to the Grand Jury with links to other information.)

I can’t excerpt any of the piece since the good doctor has a very strict copyright policy in terms of reproducing any part of his essays without written permission.  So I’ll summarize and y’all can go check out the essay to see how accurate I was.

Like many commentators, Mahaney says shouldn’t attempt to judge the doctors.  He gets to that point by affirming his support for both animal and human euthanasia, followed by an almost accurate description of the situations faced by the medical staff at Memorial Medical Center. 

When I say Mahaney was “almost accurate” I am referring to a major misrepresentation – he characterizes them all as being near the “brink of death.”

Mahaney says he based his essay on the content in the 2009 NY Times article “The Deadly Choices at Memorial” by Sheri Fink.

How, then, did he forget about Emmet Everett?  From the NY Times story:

Robichaux remembered Pou saying that the LifeCare patients were “not aware or not alert or something along those lines.” Robichaux recounted to investigators that she told Pou that that wasn’t true and said that one of LifeCare’s patients — Emmett Everett, a 380-pound man — was “very aware” of his surroundings. He had fed himself breakfast that morning and asked Robichaux, “So are we ready to rock and roll?”

The 61-year-old Honduran-born manual laborer was at LifeCare awaiting colostomy surgery to ease chronic bowel obstruction, according to his medical records. Despite a freakish spinal-cord stroke that left him a paraplegic at age 50, his wife and nurses who worked with him say he maintained a good sense of humor and a rich family life, and he rarely complained. He, along with three of the other LifeCare patients on the floor, had no D.N.R. order.

Everett’s roommates had already been taken downstairs on their way to the helicopters, whose loud propellers sent a breeze through the windows on his side of the LifeCare floor. Several times he appealed to his nurse, “Don’t let them leave me behind.” His only complaint that morning was dizziness, a LifeCare worker told Pou. 

 And this…

Several medical staff members who helped lead boat and helicopter transport that day say they would certainly have found a way to evacuate Everett. They say they were never made aware of his presence.

Dr. Anna Pou was the last person to see Everett.  He never left the room and he was reported dead.  It’s reasonable to conclude that Pou killed him.

Weirdly enough, the nonsense, inaccuracy and general pro-euthanasia prattle in Mahaney’s August 28 essay isn’t what spurred me to call attention to it and to him.  His piece is hardly unique in that regard.

You see, the good doctor did a follow-up essay on Katrina and euthanasia.  For an essay that turns out to be a punch line, it’s got a real pompous title: Ethics of  Human Doctors Performing Feline Intracardiac Euthanasia During Hurricane Katrina.

A small part of Fink’s article in the NY Times mentioned two cats that were killed after their owners brought them and requested euthanasia for them since they couldn’t take the animals with them.

Dr. Mahaney – who doesn’t think anyone should judge or question the killings of humans at Memorial does feel free to criticize the means used to kill the cats and questions whether it was necessary.  Apparently his nonjudgmentalist attitude applies to the killing of humans only.

Good grief – On the one hand it’s incredible that someone would be more OK with the “putting to sleep” of humans than animals in this scenario.  What’s really incredible is that Mahaney doesn’t seem to think there is anything contradictory or hypocritical here. The idea that the two pieces could open him to ridicule probably didn’t occur to him.

Wrong.  Part of me wonders if Mahaney is a real person or if it’s a new character that Tracey Ullman is field testing:

The video embedded above is a classic bit by the Tracey Ullman character Penny Landers – Dr. Mahaney wouldn’t be a stretch at all. I guess I’m grateful Mahaney isn’t treating humans since his standards for killing them seem to be lower than they are for cats. –Stephen Drake

Addendum: As an aside, I personally don’t take the killing of animals lightly.  At this point in time, our household is shared with two cats – one in his senior years and the other a kitten.  Both are disabled.  As a lifelong indoor cat, I doubt my three-legged senior cat’s ability to survive long on the outside, let alone a disaster area like Katrina.  The kitten might be more adaptable, but he’s got those neuromotor issues.  I would not want to be in a position of having to decide what to do with them if I had to evacuate due to disaster and couldn’t take them with me. But, honestly, my human partner is a much higher priority than either one of the felines.

3 thoughts on “Tales of the Weird – A Vet Weighs in On Katrina Hospital Killings

  1. so it’s okay to kill a Hispanic paraplegic because he’s fat, but not to stop his car and check his ID in Arizona.

    too bad the press didn’t check up on the “victims”, or the incompetence of the hospital who should have evacuated them prior to the hurricane…where are the ambulance chasing lawyers when you need them?

  2. (My original comment was lost by
    “error”…the screen said.)

    I was immediately disappointed, dismayed and angry at Dr. Fink’s “take” on the murders at Memorial Medical Center. I had a great deal of difficulty and could not get a comment on the ProPublic article; the article was released online at ProPublic and in the NYTimes at the same time. A great many comments posted were negative of the murder of patients.

    At the time, Bill Quigley, a wonderful activist attorney in NOLA, stayed inside the Memorial Medical Center with his wife, a nurse in the Katrina flooding aftermath. In an on-air call during the flooding, to
    DemocracyNow (he is often a guest on NOLA housing, Haiti, etc) (who I frequently urge to invite NDY on air as guest on “assisted suicide”, “death panels” myths and related because the good-on-political issues show is poor on disability/NDY issues),
    while inside Memorial Medical Center in NOLA raised an alarm that staff were talking about the murdering of patients by other staff. I recall that Dr. Fink was saying few or not any witnesses so “who could say” kind of thing. Phooey on that comment.

    Since the murders (and I’m surprised there was even an appearance of Grand Jury action), very little in the way of censure has been in the media. Black Agenda Report recently had an article on the murders from the perspective of their site, around the anniversary of the Katrina aftermath. (I read the site and like a great deal of it. Bill Quigley posts on the blog, as well.)

  3. boinky,

    In the disability community anyway, there are a lot of us who aren’t OK with either of those.

    As for the lawyers – I think there are some wrongful death cases that have been settled or still working their way through the system.

    That could be a thing of the past, though. Medical associations want immunity from both civil and criminal charges in disaster situations – so that medical professionals (unlike any other citizens) will be free of the burden of being accountable to the rule of law.

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