Dr. Keith Conover is making house calls in Waveland, Miss., or at least the nearest thing to house calls in a coastal city where Hurricane Katrina flattened most houses.

Conover, an emergency physician at Mercy Hospital who leads a five-member Disaster Medical Assistance Team, said the usual model of care for disaster medicine is to establish a field hospital. But when his team was deployed to the Waveland area five days ago, they quickly learned that many people couldn't manage to get to the field hospital there.

So now he and his "strike team" -- a nurse practitioner, a nurse and two paramedics, all from the Pittsburgh area -- go out each day to shattered homes and sweltering shelters in outlying communities, seeing about 300 patients a day.

"We're learning as we go along," he said, noting that during their first foray they hadn't expected to perform any surgery and didn't bring along appropriate supplies. But when the demand for stitches couldn't be ignored, they improvised, using fresh newspapers to provide a clean surface for surgery.

They've also gotten better at guessing what medications to bring with them from the team's well-stocked, refrigerated pharmacy. Many people in the Waveland area, near Bay St. Louis, are retirees, he said, and each have laundry lists of prescription drugs. "Our pharmacists," he added, "have been working their butts off."

"We're seeing the same things that any ER sees, plus some special cases," Conover said.

Like the mother who broke through windows in her flooded house so she and her five children could swim to safety -- and in the process sliced her arm down to the muscle on the broken glass. By the time Conover saw her, it was beyond the "golden eight hours" in which a wound can be safely closed before bacteria crawl in. So they cleaned her up and kept her as dry as possible until her body's white blood cells could do their work -- and they could stitch up her wounds, four days later.

They found one woman in need of kidney dialysis who hadn't left her home for fear of what would become of her beloved dogs. In that case, Conover said, they convinced her to make the trip to Biloxi for her overdue dialysis by scrounging some food for her dogs.

The team -- which includes Allison Sakara, a nurse practitioner at Children's Hospital; Daniel Christopher, an emergency room nurse at Forbes Regional Medical Center; Susan Singer, a paramedic at Jefferson Medical Center; and Walter Donnellan, a paramedic with Fort Cherry Ambulance -- makes its house calls only during daylight and only with two armed guards.

"We call them Teddy Roosevelts," Conover said of the guards, "because they walk softly but carry a big stick." The team hasn't experienced any violence, he said, but looting is common and few dare to venture beyond secure public areas at night. One family outside the secure area told of shooting at potential looters every night.

"Money is useless here," Conover said. Gasoline, alcohol, drugs and cigarettes are the coin of the realm. "Those are the things that are worth something."

But the crisis also has brought out the best in people, such as the heroin addict Conover knew only as Steve. During the storm, Steve went through an unintended withdrawal and, once the winds died down, somehow managed to organize an impromptu shelter at a local high school for 400 or 500 people.

"He just shipped out today," Conover said. "He was such a help, and he probably saved hundreds of lives."

About a third of the team's time is spent on mental health issues. "The people down here are devastated," Conover said. "I would say that everyone we've run into has been affected by it." Sometimes, they provide a shoulder to cry on; other times, they provide teddy bears for children.

The team is focused on the living, but the signs of death are unmistakable, such as the line of 100 or 200 cars washed off the highway while trying to escape the storm. The cars are empty, but their passengers couldn't have survived. "The bodies are probably out in the bayou somewhere," Conover said.

Despite it all, Conover, a veteran of Hurricanes Charlie and Ivan last year and 35 years of "remote" medicine, said the medical care being provided "is really pretty good. It's the best we've ever had in a disaster."