Hippocrates In San Diego

Wild Days and Nights

It has been an interesting 36 hours to say the least. N. and I arrived from Cleveland after the wedding reception hosted by my mom, coming in about midnight on Sunday night. We had an inkling of things to come when, as we approached San Diego from the east, our airplane’s captain announced that some wildfires were visible off to the south. We had heard on the news before leaving about some fires in Malibu, but those would not have been visible from our vantage point. It wasn’t until the next morning that I discovered, after talking to Nicole at work, that San Diego County was dealing with its own wildfires, which were much larger in scope and impact than the ones in Malibu being over-reported by the national press.

We first tried to figure out if anyone we knew needed shelter — as news reports continued to come in, it was becoming more clear that large numbers of people needed to be evacuated from the cities north of San Diego. N. probed around at work, but found that most people had already arranged with friends and family for emergency shelter. I called our friends B. and M. — initially only getting their house answering machine and busy cell phone lines. I called B. brother R., who had heard from B. a couple hours earlier and told me that they had been preparing for an evacuation at the time. Soon after I finally got in touch with B. and thankfully he and M. were able to reach her brother’s house in Rancho Penasquitos. However after a few hours they needed to leave there as well so B. and M., exhausted from their long day, arrived at our place to clean up, relax, and to try to take their minds off the potential mess that awaits them when they get back home.

Soon after their arrival, I was called in to work, to back up the resident team and moonlighter in case of a large influx of patients. Patients are being diverted from our system’s large hospital in downtown San Diego to make room for the potentially large numbers of patients needing Burn and Surgical critical care. Non-wildfire related admissions are being sent from the downtown emergency department to be admitted here, making this small hospital a busy place for the last day or so. Another hospitalist had already been called in as backup earlier in the day and admitted seven patients herself. The residency program moved two residents to help manage those patients, so now instead of the usual 2 hospitalists and 8 residents there are now 3 hospitalists and 10 residents staffing the Internal Medicine beds here. I was called in for overnight to also give the hospitalists a break (so they can rest instead of coming into the hospital should any issues arise overnight) since this disaster situation may last several days. A worst case scenario would be if many, many patients were diverted here, and the hospitalists were forced to come into help overnight while also being responsible for daytime duties. That would be dangerous and unhealthy for everyone.

Thankfully last night went fairly smoothly; other than one patient who became sick (unrelated to any fire issues) I didn’t hear from the residents. They handled themselves admirably considering the situation, and things seem to have gone well so far. The daytime hospitalists are trickling in now as I write, so it looks like I survived the night unscathed.