My wife told me about the post on website; I was not able to see it until today… Awesome... I hope that we
raised some money for such an important cause. It is going to take so much to help these people. We moved
to Baton Rouge this morning on the way to Houston. We will be in Houston until Thursday and then return home
to the Bay Area. Today is the first day since we arrived in Louisiana that we have had access to the
Internet for any substantial amount of time. Even though we were so close to the coast, we did not have
much information beyond the Hammond area. We only got news via broadcast TV (the old rabbit ears) and radio. The political shit storm is amazing.

The people here are so tough and so caring. Our facility dealt with children and the elderly who were
evacuated from the city center suffering from chronic health problems. All of the acute cases were sent
directly to Baton Rouge. We had many diabetics who really suffered, as well as hypertensive and/or
cardiac patients who were not able to take their meds. Very few of our patients were suffering form any life
threatening conditions. What we did, almost 16 hours a day, was sit with patients and try to reconstruct
their health histories for the last 10 to 20 years so that as they moved around, the physicians treating
them would not have to spend 40 minutes asking the same questions that these folks has answered the day
before. I had never thought through the implication of completely losing access to all of a patient’s
health history… it is a serious issue and that should get some attention from the FEMA people. Many of our
folks did not know the name or dosage of their medication which subsequently added hours or even days
to getting the rights meds dispensed. The rest of the time we took vitals, held hands, and tried to be as
positive as possible about the future.

All in all, I think we were very successful. At times, it was pretty humorous to see a bunch of west coast types communicating with our countrymen from the
deep south. One of our patients, Miss Beverly, overheard me talking about the posting on Sailing Anarchy to a colleague. In her very loud southern voice, she asked me “… what in the hale is sailin annocky?” When I explained that it was a website where people argued and talked about sailing stuff, she very loudly announced that I was the one who was in need of medical assistance and shook her head.
Every time I would walk by, she would say “… there’s that crazy sailin boy from out west…” I got back at
her by telling her that it was actually Sailing Anarchy was CIA code for the Salvation Army and that
all the drivers and food staff with SA on their shirts were actually Sailing Anarchy. I think she actually
believed me for about 5 minutes! Once people felt safe, we started to see some smiles. Kida are just
plain amazing. By yesterday afternoon, they were playing, running around, and generally getting into
the trouble that all kids do. We taught them that 50CC irrigating syringes made awesome water guns! The
nurses were not amused!

We did not have access to most of the news and none of the cable, talking head, Monday morning quarterback
analysis that my wife told me about. The one thing that we all heard live was the mayor’s interview with
the NO radio station that had been relocated to Baton Rouge. We were laughing and cheering when he
admonished the governor, the president, and other officials for not taking action. When he said that
the governor and the president have to “get off their asses and talk” and that he didn’t want any more “G**
D**** press conferences”, there was a standing ovation form those who could stand. There was not a dry eye
in the building when he broke down at the end of his comments. I think he represented all of us who were
subjected to the “data gathering” calls from bureaucrats.

The most ridiculous thing that occurred was when the Homeland Security area 45H (our designated location)
visited us. She brought with her four staff people who took down information about the facility. Due to
the number of patients and limited staff, we had adapted a system for charting patient’s status and
taping it to the beds, cots, or IV stands. We used color to signify overall morbidity of the patient and
wrote the principal diagnosis with a sharpie on the outside of the chart. I just about crapped my pants
when one of the minions staring lecturing us about patient confidentiality and the need to comply with
HPPA guidelines. We just started laughing. It was one of those moments when you are exhausted mentally
and emotionally and you can’t stop laughing! What an idiot. I was not witty enough to come up with
anything to say, but one of our nurses told this dumbass to go over to one of the laptops that we were
using to chart and push F1 to see the HPPA compliance statement that were using on the wireless network (of
course it was stand alone machine running MS Word). HE DID IT!!!!! God, we laughed so hard… even the patients were laughing. One of our patients said that she had been sleeping, eating, and defecating with
complete strangers for three day and that privacy did not exist any more. This little prick got all upset
and proceeded to start to lecture us about the legalities of what we were doing. We just turned and
walked away. Sad… but very amusing.

I hope we raised some money. The Salvation Army was simply unbelievable. I hope that any of our little
internet community at this website who were effected are safe.

Take Care,
Mike (NorCalMAn)
9/7/05