Dying with Dignity in the Middle of Horror and Inhumanity

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina we have all seen and heard many story of heroism, inspiring and heart breaking alike, and have added names to our rosters of "hero's in my book". Well, I'm sorry to say I dont know the names of the latest additions to my book, but God bless these people for their mettle and their compassion: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=361980

From the Daily Mail Article "We Had To Kill Our Patients"

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

[...snip...]

Their families believe their confessions are an indictment of the appalling failure of American authorities to help those in desperate need after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city, claiming thousands of lives and making 500,000 homeless.

[...snip...]

The doctor said: "I didn't know if I was doing the right thing. But I did not have time. I had to make snap decisions, under the most appalling circumstances, and I did what I thought was right.

"I injected morphine into those patients who were dying and in agony. If the first dose was not enough, I gave a double dose. And at night I prayed to God to have mercy on my soul."

[...snip...]

"We divided patients into three categories: those who were traumatised but medically fit enough to survive, those who needed urgent care, and the dying.

"People would find it impossible to understand the situation. I had to make life-or-death decisions in a split second.

"It came down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity.

[...snip...]

I dont envy those doctors, nurses and tech's their position in those hours of madness, but I respect them for it.
I respect them for respecting life enough to protect it, and when death is inevitable making the quality of life up until the moment you cross as high as possible is respecting that life. And death. Death must be respected to - and those who have suffered so much, for so long, deserve to go into it with dignity and peace. At times when there is no other humane, dignified and peaceful thing to be done, the dying process needs to be speeded up.
Those doctors, nurses and tech's made a hard, brave, decision to respect their patients lives, and give respect to their deaths. Simply put, that took a lot of fucking balls. And a lot of love.
Life is hard, the earth is a harsh mistress and no amount of law, regulation or philoshopical ruling on ethics will ever change that - although it certainly seems to try. Life will always push people to the extreme where law, regulation and ethics dont even have meaning, because they have no ability to grasp the situation at hand. Those things, the laws and regulations of a field, or a country even, only have meaning when everything is going perfectly - when things are going horribly, when the harshness that is natural to this world raises its head, the rule of law is not a tool capable of dealing with it, or the circumstances it creates.
But, like the one good doctor said "People would find it impossible to understand the situation", and they do. No one wants to understand, when everything is going good, that our system of rule making and ethics as good as it is, is wholly fallible on a gust of wind.