It's personal - Community Memorial Health System

continue to be able to receive the latest andgreatest healthcare possible right here inVentura. Also, I like imagining that my futuregrandchildren, grandnieces and grandnephewsmight be born–and later receive the highestquality healthcare–in the new CommunityMemorial Hospital.Additionally, my wife and I, my brothersand sister, my friends and neighbors, will be partof the aging Baby Boom generation that will oneday likely receive leading edge geriatric care inthe new Community Memorial Hospital. Indeed,the new CMH is being built with the comingdecades in mind to be able to grow and adopt futuretechnologies in order to expertly care for mydaughter and son when they are senior citizens.For more than a century, investing in expansionas well as new technologies has been a hallmarkof Community Memorial Hospital–alwaysof Our CommunityThe scopeof CommunityMemorialHospital’sproud legacyto ourcommunityis impossibleto measureor properlyarticulate.cast at age 3, a broken wrist set a few years later,and a hip stress fracture diagnosed with state-ofthe-artimaging and treated last year at age 20.CMH is where my daughter had masterfulorthopedic leg surgery as a teen; and at age 22spent Valentine’s Day night in the EmergencyDepartment getting stitches in her forehead anda high-tech CT Scan to rule out serious injury aftertripping and falling headfirst into a knee-highbrick wall. As I said, peace of mind.CMH is where I had two separate and successfulsurgeries for entrapped nerves that hadtemporarily paralyzed both thumbs and fourfingers; had laser surgery to remove a kidneystone; and eight years ago underwent a delicatetwo-hour cervical discectomy-and-fusion aftersuffering a ruptured disk between my fifth andsixth vertebrae when a drunk driver speeding 65miles per hour on a city street rear-ended me ata stop sign.CMH is where my father had his gallbladderremoved, and had two high-tech proceduresin the Cath Lab to put in cardiac stents. It iswhere my two older brothers and younger sisterhave been patients; where my nieces and nephewswere born; where my friends, co-workers,and neighbors have been cared for.Now comes the time to reframe the essayquestion to this: What WILL the NEW CommunityMemorial Hospital mean to me?Again, the simple answer is peace ofmind. I like knowing that my family today willat crucial junctures with the help of key communitymembers. Indeed, in its past incarnationsas Elizabeth Bard Memorial Hospital, Big SistersHospital, Hospital de Buena Ventura, FosterMemorial Hospital, and today’s CommunityMemorial Hospital, generous individuals havemade all the difference. Eugene P. Foster, GeorgePower, Fritz Huntsinger, Sr., and Ida Goodyear,to name but four farsighted benefactors, whostepped forward in times of great need.Goodyear, for example, not only led a fundraisingdrive to build a new maternity wing in1946 to handle the baby boom following WorldWar II, she made the largest donation to theproject: $130,000. Her legacy lives on to this daywith Community Memorial Hospital’s stature asthe preeminent birth center in the county.Huntsinger’s selfless legacy includes writinga $1-million check in 1963 to build a cutting-edgecardiac catheterization lab; and in 1974 donating$500,000 to purchase an EMI-scanner that madeCMH the first hospital west of the Mississippito have this ground-breaking technology for diagnosingbrain disorders such as tumors, strokesand blood clots.Foster, meanwhile, donated the land at thecurrent Community Memorial Hospital campusto build a new facility in 1929 when the originalBard Hospital, then called Big Sisters Hospital,had become too small and outdated despite theaddition of an annex. What is more, Foster feltso strongly the community absolutely needed a6 CARING | COMMUNITY MEMORIAL HEALTH SYSTEM