Dr. Randy Taplitz and her home destroyed in the L.A. wildfires.Photo:Courtesy of Dr. Randy Taplitz; Courtesy of City of Hope
Courtesy of Dr. Randy Taplitz; Courtesy of City of Hope
A California physician says she is still processing the loss of her home as she continues to provide care to cancer patients amid theongoing fires in Los Angeles.
“It’s starting to hit me, but you put one foot in front of the other and you got to step forward,” Dr. Randy Taplitz, 63, tells PEOPLE exclusively. “I will say, I live up in this community of Altadena, which is a really wonderful old neighborhood. … It’s just so sad to think about what these people are going through.”
“It’s funny how you sort of lose track of the sequence of events, but so Wednesday it was all hands on deck at the hospital,” Taplitz says, adding that she had evacuated her home on Tuesday night. “We were preparing for the possibility of evacuation. We were closing all the clinics, we were discharging patients, we were reaching out to patients who were frightened and who were at home and didn’t know what to do.”
Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE’s free daily newsletterto stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
She tells PEOPLE that she got the text while she was in the middle of a hospital meeting.
“They basically said, ‘We’re so sorry, your house is gone,’ " she adds. “So I found out about that while I was at the hospital that day. It was quite a day. It was quite a day.”
Photos showed the loss of her longtime home, but Taplitz has not yet visited the area to see for herself, she notes. Instead, the clinician continues to be at the hospital, focusing on “how best to care” for the patients there.
Amid the uncertain environment, Taplitz said hospital leaders tried to decide what was best for those undergoing treatment — whether it was safe to discharge them and whether the hospital itself in Duarte, east of Pasadena, would need to be evacuated.
“I think what was really striking was just seeing faculty and staff coming together to do what was best for the patients,” she says, adding, “A lot of people were not sure if their houses were still standing.”
“She asked me, ‘Hey, are you okay or is your house okay? Is your family safe?’ ” Taplitz recalls. “I said, ‘We’re all safe, but unfortunately we lost our home.’ And she was so upset on my behalf, and it was just quite striking. She actually got a little kind of teary and said, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and was asking me about my situation in the midst of her being ill.
That interaction moved her, speaking to the “privilege it is to have that relationship with patients.”
Taplitz adds, “It’s kind of why we do what we do.”
Click hereto learn more about how to help the victims of the L.A. fires.
source: people.com
