This is the Astrodome, not the Superdome. It's smells a lot less here. It's cooler, and less chaotic. Still, it's a basin of folks with many ills, where everyone lines up to be treated.

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And it's no short line.

Mary Cavnar Johnson, M.D., private practitioner turned Red Cross volunteer, is quick and kind. Whenever she glances over a patient's shoulder, though, the line doesn't get any shorter.

In four hours, she's treated 50 people. (At her practice, Johnson sees no more than 30 in a routine, eight-hour day.)

All around her, where baseballs and footballs once flew over green turf, volunteers in Red-Cross vests, nurses and doctors are taking pulses, feeling foreheads, flipping through a 51-page list of generic medications, scribbling prescriptions as fast as they are able.

Beverly Williams, 43, hands her a worn slip of paper. Williams has high blood pressure. She lost her medications in New Orleans, her house, and her three kids. That was three days ago. She keeps twitching in her chair. Johnson doesn't like the twitching.

"Your BP is real high, Beverly." The doctor pumps up the blood-pressure cuff on her patient's arm. "You getting headaches?" Pump, pump. "What meds were you taking?"

Williams shakes her head. The dark pouches under her eyes twitch. She's trying, but recollecting isn't easy when you've been addressless, foodless and bedless for much of 72 hours.

Johnson nods to the EMTs. Gently, she says, "Beverly? Here's your prescription. These folks are going to take you to a hospital. Then a pharmacy. Tomorrow, we'll do another BP check. OK?"

Grimacing, the woman hoists herself from the chair. Turning to go, she murmurs, "Y'all be blessed."

Next is Yuri Clark, 17, student. Two days earlier, she was up to her chin in New Orleans murk. ("It felt like walking in dirty vegetable soup.") Now, she's got a welt on her left thigh as big as her palm. It hurts. So does her head.

Something bit her, the doctor says.

A snake, perhaps.

CONTINUED : 'When's the insulin coming?'

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