Dodging the sun, seeing the Clovis future

Atop the tallest building in Clovis, I favored looking to the west. That’s how I’ve always driven to Clovis Community Medical Centers in the 23 years since it relocated from the tidy, tiny confines of DeWitt Avenue.

West is likely where the stores will continue to bloom, at least initially, as hospital expansion plays out over the next few years. And, truth be told, at 8 a.m., on the west side of the roof of the five-story in-patient bed tower, you could sense the past, imagine the future and not be caught in the blistering fury of the June sun.

Find a few cool minutes some day and invest them in encountering “the Clovis hospital,” as locals still call it. In the 1980s, it was saddled with the hick label of “the hospital that could be run by phone from downtown.” Not long after it opened, I recall visiting a friend there — and not encountering a soul from the front door till I reached his bedside.

Not no more.

I joined Clovis CEO Craig Castro as he gave a tour to Lynne Ashbeck, regional vice president of the Hospital Council and Clovis City Council member, and Steve Geil, CEO of the Fresno Economic Development Corporation and his assistant, Kristen Kawaguchi. Clad in yellow vests, hard hats and safety glasses, Castro and Clark Construction senior project manager Geoff Lawton steered us around the site.

When done, all 205 rooms in Clovis will be private, a unique facility in the Valley. Even with one second-floor room presentable for viewing, one must stretch imagination.

I’ve gingerly stepped on the rebar of Community Regional Medical Center’s trauma center during its construction in downtown Fresno, and into the windswept corners of the then-incomplete Children’s Hospital of Central California in Madera. Unlike home building, the enormity and complexity of hospital construction — with all the California rules and regs, each hospital bed costs about $2 million — numb the brain. There are the special gas hookups, the earthquake and fire-safety features, placement of nurses stations and monitoring, the types/textures of floorings, of coloring, the testings, approvals and relentness devotion to safety.

As staff and patients flood these floors in the coming years, all these critically important to-do’s will have been accomplished and not recollected. In the end, it’s about creating a quality care experience and a successful healing.

A goodly number of folks, and their families, have invested their skills, dollars and best intentions into making this happen. It takes vision — and the kind of risk that parents take, knowing they may not be around to see how their vision, hopes and investment are fully realized. Lots of names come to mind … Takahashi, Radin, Leon and Pete Peters, Herwaldt, Tolladay, Reinhart, Miller, Fries.

As we tuck away the safety gear, a single thought crystalizes: Something remarkable is happening here.