Can we do this

“Can we do this?” is the question John Thiele turned to Karen Wynn with at Memorial Medical Center, just before giving medication to patients who were still alive. It begins as a request for moral confirmation in an emergency and returns afterward as a question about responsibility, law, and the lasting cost of what happened. Its force lies partly in that change: the words remain the same, but the decision they ask about cannot be left behind.

The Question Before the Injections

The hospital’s emergency conditions shaped the scene. Many patients lacked intravenous lines, and Wynn and Anna Pou had requested IV catheters, but not the fluids and tubing that would have been needed to hydrate patients unable to drink. As Thiele tried to start lines for patients near the windows, their blood pressures were so low that their veins had collapsed. They appeared lifeless, though they were breathing and one moaned softly.

Thiele had to act amid the difference between a principle considered in the abstract and a decision made at a patient’s bedside. He trusted Wynn’s intensive-care experience and her leadership of the hospital ethics committee. Wynn believed that medicating the patients was necessary because they needed comfort. Her answer gave Thiele the assent he sought, but it did not make the act simple or remove the burden of judgment.

Thiele administered morphine and midazolam at doses higher than he normally used in the intensive care unit. Most patients died within minutes. One man, a heavyset Black patient whose breathing remained labored, continued to breathe after additional morphine. Thiele thought the total dose might have reached 100 milligrams and prayed with Wynn, wondering whether the man’s poor circulation was preventing the drug from taking effect. He then covered the man’s face with a towel. The patient stopped breathing in less than a minute.

From Moral Doubt to Consequence

The question acquired a sharper edge after the act. Thiele later recalled that smothering the man had gone against every fiber of his being and was something he had never imagined himself doing. Although he had felt that the action was right, he continued to question it: whether the patient was aware, whether he would have died soon anyway, and whether suffocation had been cruel. The refrain holds those uncertainties together without resolving them.

Thiele left the hospital by helicopter that Thursday evening and arrived at an airport filled with patients evacuated from hospitals and nursing homes. Many were moaning or motionless; some needed oxygen, respiratory therapists, or ventilators, while others had been separated from medicines for chronic conditions. That night brought moans, screams, and deaths, with no time to move the bodies. Thiele’s moral clarity returned in the face of that suffering: he believed the patients he had medicated at Memorial would otherwise have suffered and died there. The contrast offered him a reason for his decision, but it did not erase the earlier question.

After the disaster, the refrain changed from a moral question into a legal one. Thiele’s home had been destroyed, Memorial had closed, and he was out of work; at the same time, he needed to find the means to pay his attorney as the attorney general’s inquiry continued. At a December meeting of Memorial doctors planning a possible reopening, he read a letter stating that Tenet had not agreed to cover his legal fees and costs. His lawyer argued that Tenet had authority to pay even though Thiele was a physician contractor rather than a direct employee. The question now included who would bear the consequences of the decision and who would stand behind the people who made it.

The Question’s Afterlife

The aftermath extended beyond Thiele. Wynn’s lawyer prepared her for a possible grand-jury appearance, explaining the kinds of questions to expect and helping her keep her account clear and consistent. Talking through the events could feel like reliving them; after some meetings, Wynn needed weeks to feel able to move forward again. She suspected that she and her colleagues were living with post-traumatic stress disorder. Once a nurse who had spent a quarter century at the hospital, she no longer wanted the responsibility of nursing management and felt she had given up part of her soul there.

Gina Isbell, too, remained haunted by the patients she had cared for. She had nightmares, felt anger and bitterness that help had come too slowly, and considered herself changed forever by the storm. Yet a memory from the helipad endured: Roy Culotta’s eighty-seven-year-old grandmother told Isbell that if she were alive the next day, it would be because of her. Isbell still believed that she and her colleagues had done the best they could, and said she would serve in another storm if asked. Her account does not answer Thiele’s question for him; it shows how the emergency continued to shape the people who had acted within it.

Thiele’s own later medical crisis sharpened the distinction at the heart of his reasoning. During weeks of sedation, he experienced nightmarish visions of monsters and pods and repeatedly felt himself underwater, struggling to surface while someone pushed him down. A nurse who had cared for him thought he seemed remorseful about his role at Memorial, but Thiele later denied having felt that way and said he remained confident in what he had done. Despite a grim prognosis and multiple signs associated with poor survival, his conditions were potentially reversible. He believed he would have continued treating a patient in his condition, because the possibility of recovery distinguished his illness from the cases he had faced at Memorial. The repeated question therefore remains unsettled: it records a moment of hesitation, but neither that hesitation nor the suffering that followed supplies a single, final verdict.