December 2005

Katrina update: Saints’ DC OK;
his spirit remains strong

SPECIAL TO CHIROPRACTIC ECONOMICS — On Aug. 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina plowed through the Gulf Coast, destroyed New Orleans, and played havoc with the lives of thousands of people, including Robert Lizana, DC, the team chiropractor to the New Orleans Saints.

Lizana was one of the 34 pro team chiropractors featured in “Who keeps the pros in prime condition?” in the Oct. 5, 2005, issue of Chiropractic Economics. That issue was going to press when Katrina hit.

The hurricane ripped the roof off Lizana’s clinic. It destroyed most of his livelihood, but it didn’t destroy his life.

“I’m working with the Saints out of San Antonio,” Lizana told Chiropractic Economics in an update telephone call. “I’m there five days a week. Then I come back home for two days and help adjust some of my remaining patients.”

He treats patients in borrowed facilities. Harold Ehrenberg, DC, opened his small Lake Chiropractic Clinic in Metairie to several chiropractors who lost their offices. They share facilities to care for patients who stayed behind in the aftermath of Katrina or who have since returned.

Lizana said that when Katrina approached, he and his wife and children took refuge in a small private hospital, along with several other medical staff. The patients had been evacuated.

“We could see I-10 from the hospital,” he said. “It looked more like a boat ramp than a highway. The worst part was not knowing what was going on.

For four days, he, his wife and several other chiropractors adjusted rescue workers. “We did this until the main doctor told us to evacuate. It was too dangerous,” said Lizana, referring to the conditions that pervaded the New Orleans area in the aftermath of the storm and levee break.

Initially, the Lizanas went to Baton Rouge, but the city was “overwhelmed.” Six days after the hurricane, they fled to Clearwater, Fla., where he left his children with family members. He and his wife returned to the devastation in Jefferson Parish, to volunteer in a makeshift clinic in a tent put up by a church group outside the police station in Metairie.

“We had to do something,” he said. “We adjusted National Guardsmen and police.”

Although his life has been “turned upside down … 21 years destroyed,” he continues to work with the Saints. “The players give me a sense of family,” he said.

Family is important to him. “I went from being a dad who went to every after-school event my 10-year-old son had to one who didn’t get to see his kids for 11 weeks,” he lamented. But he is comforted knowing that his children are all right and that his home survived the hurricane relatively unscathed.

Not so, his staff. Prior to the hurricane, his clinic operated with three chiropractors, one medical doctor, and 14 staff. “Now they are all dispersed to different states,” he said.

What will the future hold for Lizana? “Come January, my work with the Saints is done,” he said. “I started thinking, ‘What will we do?’ I called my wife, who splits her time between Florida and home. Before Katrina we had a million-dollar practice. I built it by wanting to serve people.

“My wife and I are thinking … we want to go back and establish a place, a clinic. Not like we had before, but a place displaced chiropractors (like the guys I’m sharing office space with now) can practice and rebuild their practices.”

The practice Lizana envisions would not be a traditional group practice . It would be more on the line of a co-operative. “I want them, these solo practitioners, to rebuild their lives,” he said, referring to the chiropractors with whom he is sharing Ehrenberg’s clinic.

Lizana is able to check e-mail occasionally. Friends and those who would like to help him with his embryonic vision of a co-op clinic may contact him at Drrob@abigno.com.

Source: Robert Lizana, DC, updated editor Linda Segall after a friend faxed him a copy of the Editor’s Message that appeared in Vol. 51, Issue 14. That editorial wondered about his safety.

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