Posted February 2, Reviewed by Jessica Schrader. On Jan. My beloved home of 22 years was on fire. Every few hours, my children and I learned of another friend who has lost their home.
The photos and videos were shocking, eerie, and strangely captivating and gorgeous all at once. I did things backwards, as I often do. I took an early-morning flight to the fires in Los Angeles, and my Uber driver picked me up at 5 a.
I told her I was lucky she was an early bird. She chuckled and admitted that she was, in fact, a night owl. I hoped she would get to sleep after she dropped me off. But as we spoke, I found out that she would go home to be a mom after working all night.
I gleaned so much wisdom during our drive to the Daniel K. Inouye Airport in Honolulu. The matriarchy of the Hawaiian culture is astounding. For the past year, I have split time between Los Angeles, where my children live and go to school, and the island of Oahu. The Shriners Hospital for Children has inspired me throughout my career, and my father before me. The mission-based wrap-around care for children is the antidote to the quagmire that is health care in our country in Here is a place that supports me and my staff to keep the patient and family at the center of everything, and to treasure the relationship between patient and physician and clinician above all else.
My children, their father, and I figured out a way to work out logistics and minimize disruption to their teenage existences. As the January fires in Los Angeles unfolded, the matriarch of my family and world, my and-a-half-year-old mother, was in constant contact. She is whip smart and she has been in charge of every generation she has lived through. She is great at a lot of things. She loves a good catastrophe. The last time we evacuated with my children from a fire zone in Los Angeles, I was still married and my mother lived nearby in Westwood.
