Triage or palliative care vs. euthanasia in New Orleans

I may be too certain of the integrity of my fellow doctors, but I don't believe the headlines on blog.bioethics.net or the insinuations on NPR. I believe that there is a legitimate, ethical explanation as to what happened on the 7th floor of the New Orleans Memorial Medical Center.

If the generators were off, the ventilators would not work and many of the monitors and other machines couldn't be used, either. Even Judge Greer, who denied Terri Schiavo oral fluids and nutrition after her feeding tube was pulled, is reported to have allowed IV morphine to attenuate the visible symptoms that you and I associate with suffering. And some doctor prescribed, and several nurses administered, the drug.

It is only right and proper to give sedating medications if life-sustaining technology is suddenly and unavoidably not available.

I don't have any more information than what is available on the internet - I certainly don't have access to "secret" documents - but I'd imagine that the patients on this ward would be accustomed to large amounts of morphine and other sedatives. If so, they'd require larger than normal amounts to help them be symptom free when the doctors and nurses could no longer keep them alive by technological means.

From what I'm reading, we will most likely never know the motives behind the administration of the drugs in New Orleans. I am making a choice to believe that nurses and doctors who had cared for these patients for days continued to care. They treated symptoms as the patients died from their diseases,rather than intentionally ending their patients' lives prematurely.