He declined, but left for Houston the following day after buying supplies and arranging for his wife, also a Newhall Memorial emergency room nurse, to care for the couples' two young children.

Spaid, a flight nurse in the Air Force Reserve for seven years - who served in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 - asked to be sent to a remote location. They plunked him and another nurse in a rental car and dispatched them to Texarkana, in the northeast part of Texas. A week after the hurricane, 180 evacuees were bused to the community recreation center where they worked. It was only staffed during the day.

Psychiatric patients and people with high blood pressure were off their medications until the Red Cross procured a fresh supply a week later, he said.

"The next day, the (other nurse) got in the rental car, got on a plane to Oklahoma and went home without telling anybody what she had done," he said. She apparently had an anxiety attack, and was unprepared by her work - for an allergist in a hospice - for the drama.

"I was by myself. I lost 5 pounds the first week I was there," working 18 to 20 hours a day nonstop, he said. "I held this down by myself. The local medical community would come in and volunteer an hour or two."

He managed to relocate all his patients to homes, rental units, long-term-care facilities or other shelters, but it was not yet time to return home.

The Red Cross deployed him to a shelter in San Antonio, where again, nobody was covering the nights. He offered to do it if others would work days.

"It was kind of frightening," he said. "It was a mall the size of (Westfield) Valencia Town Center - converted into a shelter," he said. "As far as you could see were beds, cots, crutches, wheelchairs."

More than 650 people took refuge there. By day, doctors and nurses from a local clinic oversaw their care. Spaid was on solo duty at night for a week, taking care of hundreds of patients.

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