Tending To Patients As Her New Home Burns
Julayne Smithson was working an overnight shift in the Intensive Care Unit at the Kaiser Permanente hospital in Santa Rosa, Calif., when massive wildfires started racing through the city. Smithson had no idea how close they were. She was too busy taking care of her patient.
“One of the nurses came up to me and she said, ‘Julayne, I’m sorry, but your house is not going to make it,’” she said.
Smithson, 55, recently moved from Indiana and had just bought the house a few weeks ago. From the hospital window, she could see the flames moving through her neighborhood a block away.
“I was so busy working the last couple of weeks that I didn’t get my insurance, which I never do. I never ever, ever go uninsured,” she said. “I kept saying, ‘Tomorrow, I’m going to do that. Tomorrow, I’m going to do that.’”
Smithson asked a colleague to watch her patient and raced home to try to save a few things.
“I knew I didn’t have much time,” she said. “So I ran inside and I thought, ‘I have to get my nursing documents, because if I’m going to lose everything I own, I have to be able to work, to care for patients.’”
Tending To Patients As Her New Home Burns