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On Jan. 7. 2025, we all learned that Los Angeles was burning. 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.m. in the pre-dawn quiet darkness of my sleepy beach town on Oahu on Jan. 10. 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. Some phrases my night owl dropped included “boundaries, not barriers,” and “anger is armor.” This was a woman who I wanted a phrase to describe. I asked her… is there a Hawaiian word for “powerful woman”? The matriarchy of the Hawaiian culture is astounding. And the phrase she taught me is “MANA WAHINE.” Google sums it up as follows: “A mana wahine is a woman who motivates and inspires others to be courageous and who is committed to preserving Hawaiian traditions and stories.” That morning’s proximity to this powerful soul strengthened my resolve to keep on moving.
For the past year, I have split time between Los Angeles, where my children live and go to school, and the island of Oahu. I have somehow found myself in the career opportunity of a lifetime, that “dream job” that exceeds my wildest aspirations.
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 2025. 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.
I pinched myself when the opportunity to become chief of staff at Shriners Children’s became a reality. My children, their father, and I figured out a way to work out logistics and minimize disruption to their teenage existences. Circumstances then led to me taking on the interim chief of staff role at Shriners Children’s Southern California. I have 50% custody of my children and am able to work in the best pediatric orthopaedic organization on the planet in two locations.
As the January fires in Los Angeles unfolded, the matriarch of my family and world, my 81-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. She could not have been happier for us to settle our three small children into her home, and the chaos around her was strangely heavenly. This time is starkly different for us all. My mother and I were supposed to trust from afar (she now lives in Portland, Oregon), and this is not in our wheelhouse.
Balancing and integrating for most of us is precarious on any given day. And then catastrophe strikes. It was fascinating to feel my professional world flexing as I fled toward my children. The common humanity that supported me in being a parent felt sentimental and bewildering. We will rally and support as our city again finds safety, grieves, and rebuilds. Like any day, we hold our loved ones close and give grace to those who cannot.
