My mom posted a link to a post at nola.com which has an account of the hurricane and its aftermath at Tenet's Memorial Medical Center. Rene Goux, the CEO of Tenet's Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, writes about hurricane and the flooding of the hospital (it's pretty much at the bottom of the bowl that is New Orleans).

Conditions at the hospital deteriorated rapidly. There was no plumbing; the toilets were overflowing. The stench was overwhelming. None of us had been able to bathe for four or five days. The smell of sewage was nauseating and it was unbearably hot. We started breaking windows to give our patients some ventilation. At the end, we were reduced to one meal a day. We had no power at all for the last two days. None of the elevators were working, so we had to carry patients up as many as eight floors to the helipad or down to the boats. [nola.com: Memorial Medical Center Evacuation]

The people working at that hospital deserve some kind of recognition for the work they did. They work in an intense environment as it is and this just sounds insane.