Missing Doctors

I had heard about the cases of the "Mysterious Disappearing Doctors" here recently, but today I experienced it first had. I had a routine eye doctor appointment (for a check-up) scheduled this morning and went to the assigned office. Whoops! I could see when I peered into the window of the office that it had been flooded and was closed.
So, I telephoned the other two branches of the ophthalmologist's office and got a recording that asked the caller to leave a message. But, alas! The voice mailbox was filled already. At that point I decided to call the "emergency number" the recording gave.
It was an answering service that said, "The three offices were all badly flooded and will not be opened until a later date". Two of the offices are in the city of New Orleans and the one I was to use today in my own suburban parish. So this doctor and his partner physician are out of business now, probably due to the loss of expensive equipment, as well as their physical locations.
But it is odd that no one from the office (But perhaps, like so many businesses here now, there are no employees left in town to attend to routine office business?) called me and the other patients to inform them that appointments and services have been scheduled? And what about patients who have medical problems and need immediate attention?
It is just one of the many "interesting" after affects of this hurricane's devastation. The word is out that even doctors have fled the city, some not bothering to inform their patients that they are out of practice. Unfortunately, this state has no electronic registry to which patients could look to, locate their doctor or find out whether he or she is still in practice.
Instead, one must do leg work, as I did, and then call a hospital or doctor search office to find a new physician. of course this does not answer an even bigger problem- the loss of patient records. No doubt many patient records were flooded and lost, or are just displaced as the doctor's have fled to new venues.