Rebirth amid ruin

The best way to see post-Katrina New Orleans is with a native. Sure, $35 buys a three-hour bus tour past destruction most only have witnessed on the pages of newspapers and television broadcasts. Those who book trips experience what I imagine is a shocking but detached visit to the now-famous St. Bernard Parish, the lower Ninth Ward and the 17th Street Canal levee break.

But spend the day with two resolute veterinarians from the Big Easy, you learn much more. You feel New Orleans and what it once was. You see, hear and smell what it's become. You listen to anecdotes and tales of hard living from two doctors with big hearts, hope and a resolution to pull their businesses out of the drink. For an outsider from up North, such stirring accounts carve windows deep into destruction left by one of the nation's most mind-bending disasters.

In few words, it's surreal.

Little appears changed in the year following the great flood of New Orleans. Houses, if they can be called that, sit untouched and, like many of the streets, empty. Trash piles tower over mangled cars. Fluorescent script still highlights the exteriors of what were once homes, telling the tale of the dead, the rescued and who witnessed the events. Such cleanup requires bulldozers, not brooms. Language fails to wrap its arms around the devastation's breadth and the expanse of hardships.

Like most remaining residents, the area's practitioners still are trying to make sense of it. They've saved animals, aided clients and now are focused on rebuilding their practices and homes. Everyone has a story to tell. Last year, Drs. Patrick McSweeney and Gary Levy welcomed DVM Newsmagazine into their lives just three weeks after Katrina turned them upside down.

A visit back finds them tired and weary but brewing plans of renewal. They've banded together, two practices facing Katrina's brutal truth and persevering. It speaks to the nature of these veterinarians, trusted professionals who became much more than colleagues. They're living examples of generosity, survival and endurance. They know something about the fragility of life ... and the power of friendship.

Jennifer Fiala