ST. LOUIS -- Dorothy Durald is safe in a nursing home in Town and Country. A small Christmas tree adorns her dresser. Family photos enliven a wall.

A bright yellow poster says, "We love our grandmother. Stronger than any hurricane."

The security is a long way from the mayhem of Hurricane Katrina -- and the week when her family didn't know where she was, or even if she was alive.

Durald, 84, endured five days in a flooded nursing home in New Orleans. Finally rescued by military helicopter, she ended up in a hospital in San Antonio.

Her frantic family finally located her there on Sept. 4, six days after Katrina struck. She was dehydrated, thoroughly confused and suffering from a large bedsore, they said.

Durald is in St. Louis because one of her daughters, Gail Azu of Chesterfield, found a doctor here to perform surgery on the bedsore. Since November, Durald has been in the Town and Country Healthcare Center, where her family intends for her to stay.

Her hope for Christmas?

"I want all of us to get together again," Durald said last week.

She will get her wish. More than 20 relatives will be in town this week visiting Durald, matriarch of their far-flung family.

"After the horrible roller coaster of not knowing where she was, and then not knowing if she'd survive, we know we are blessed," Azu said. "We know that others like her didn't make it."

Officials in Louisiana have estimated that 10 percent of the 1,322 people whose deaths were attributed to Katrina were residents of nursing homes when the storm struck Aug. 29. Durald, a native of New Orleans, had been a resident of the Lafon Nursing Home of the Holy Family, where 22 of the more than 130 residents who stayed through the storm did not survive the heat and deprivation that followed.

Storm surges flooded the New Orleans East neighborhood where the damaged Lafon still stands. Press reports from the time said Sister Augustine McDaniel, Lafon's administrator, decided to ride out the storm. Only about one-third of the 60 Louisiana nursing homes that were hit by the storm had been evacuated.

When the levees failed, the Lafon's first floor was flooded with 5 feet of water.

Durald, a widow, needs nursing home care because of a stroke she suffered three years ago. She speaks slowly. To her family's relief, her memories of the ordeal are few.

Durald remembers almost nothing of the days that followed Katrina.

"They put us in a helicopter, and that's how I got here," she said. "I feel it was a good trip."

Azu said she and her relatives spent the next week trying to find her mother, who wore an identifying bracelet. "We burned up the cell phones," she said. "Nobody was at the (nuns') motherhouse. We called the mayor's office. We called Mississippi, Texas, anybody. We heard (Lafon) had evacuated. That they hadn't. We found her in San Antonio and went down there the next day.

"We still don't know about those days before she was rescued," Azu said. "We think she spent it in a wheelchair."

The family arranged for surgery at Missouri Baptist Medical Center in Town and Country, and for medical transportation to St. Louis. In a stroke of good fortune, Mercy MedFlight of Fort Worth, Texas, agreed to fly her here at no charge.

Azu, who grew up in New Orleans, is the oldest of Durald's three children. She trained as an X-ray technician in the 1960s at the old Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis. She and her husband, Charles, have lived here since 1975 and raised four children: Jonathan and Michelle, both of whom live in New York, Charles in Detroit and Lisa Azu-Popow in Chicago. All of them will be here with Durald this week.

"It will be a very good Christmas," Gail Azu said.