Respected cancer surgeon Dr. Anna Pou was accused of giving lethal doses of drugs to four patients in New Orleans during the chaos that ensued after Hurricane Katrina. She has been cleared of those charges but still faces two lawsuits.

Despite the legal turmoil Pou was in after the storm, she tells the Associated Press that if she had to do it all over again, she would still stay with her patients. Her experience made her a champion of emergency care workers and helped get landmark state legislation approved that aims to protect the actions of doctors and nurses during disasters.

Pou never thought of evacuating Memorial Medical Center back in August 2005, even after hurricane warnings were issued for New Orleans. After Katrina struck the morning of Aug. 29, power failed, levees broke and 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded. Four days of misery, leading to 34 patient deaths, began at Memorial. Then, it seemed the decision not to evacuate was a good one, as hospital staff had yet to find out the levees were collapsing, sending water rushing into the city. By Tuesday, the water rose to 10 feet in the streets.

Water pressure dropped, toilets backed up and the temperature in the eight-story hospital, where windows could not be opened, rose to almost 110 degrees. For the 2,000 people at Memorial, including 200 patients, the situation was horrifying. They heard stories of rapes and robberies, and they rationed the water and food supply.

"You can’t really understand what it was like if you weren’t there," Pou said. "Nothing can describe it."

The healthiest patients were airlifted by helicopter from the hospital’s roof. Pou was one of the last to leave Memorial. In January 2006, she started working at a Baton Rouge hospital, but was arrested in July 2007 and charged with four counts of second-degree murder. Attorney General Charles Foti accused Pou and two nurses of using a "lethal cocktail" of medication to kill four elderly patients.

Pou had always admitted giving the medication to the patients but insisted she did so only to relieve pain, not to euthanize them them.

"All of us need to remember the magnitude of human suffering that occurred on the city of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina so that we could be sure that this never happens again," Pou said last year after the charges against her and two other nurses were dropped. "And no health care professional should ever be falsely accused in a rush to judgment."

A grand jury refused to indict Pou, but two civil lawsuits against Pou in the deaths are pending.

"I’ve learned a lot from this," Pou told the AP. "I thought I had suffered at times in my life, but I had no idea the depths of pain one person could feel. I think that has made me a better person and certainly a more compassionate doctor."