Medical oncologist Ravi Salgia was watching news coverage of the fires with his wife Deborah and their adult daughter Sabrina on Tuesday night when Deborah noticed a red amber outside. She went into their Pasadena backyard to investigate. Around 6:30 p.m. she told her husband “There’s fire right above us.”
The family was not expecting it.
“She really saved us,” says Salgia, chair of medical oncology at the renowned cancer center City of Hope. “She said, ‘The house above us is burning and the flames are coming down.’”
The family grabbed their passports and marriage certificate. “We didn’t have any time to pack,” Salgia says. Within five minutes they left home in three separate cars staying in close cell phone contact. “We didn’t know if our house was going to burn down,” he says. “We left and we didn’t know where to go.”
Photo of the fire from Ravi Sakgia’s house in Pasadena.
Dr. Ravi Salgia
“If my wife hadn’t gone in the backyard, I think we would’ve been toast. I really think so,” he says. Soon other neighbors on his cul-de-sac evacuated too. “We all left our houses behind not knowing what was going to happen,” he says. “We took our life in our own hands, all three of us, but at the end of the day, had to be safe.”
In nearly 100 mph winds, the family navigated trees falling onto the crowded roads. They stayed in cell phone contact and met at a hotel in nearby Arcadia.
Just after midnight on Wednesday, Salgia received a text from the City of Hope hospital command center, saying there was an emergency meeting. Salgia’s family was safe at the hotel, but he worried about his patients’ safety. He headed to the hospital.
“We have to make sure our patients are safe,” he explains.
After he left, his wife and daughter followed him from the hotel to the hospital. They were there when he arrived at 2:30 a.m.
“They surprised me,” he says. “They said, “Dad, we’re not going to leave you.’”
He remembers them saying, “We can help.”
Photo of the fire from Ravi Sakgia’s house in Pasadena.
Dr. Ravi Salgia
Deborah had recently retired from the hospital as a bereavement counselor and Sabrina was formerly an occupational therapist and is now a senior medical student.
They were able to help with patients on the main floor of the hospital floor while Salgia went to the fifth floor himself.
“I huddled with the nurses and said, ‘Let’s take care of our patients. Let’s figure out who’s sick. Let’s prioritize if we have to evacuate, and let’s see if we can discharge patients who are safe to be discharged so they can avoid the fires or evacuation if necessary,'” he recalls.
Out the window, he could see the fire coming.
“But we have a lot of faith. I believe in a higher being,” he says. “And at the same time, we believe in each other. My goal was to say, “How can we make sure our patients and their families are safe?” That’s why I came to work. And luckily, the winds shifted.”
Salgia comes from a family of healthcare providers. His father was a physician. And joining his daughter Sabrina in the medical field is his younger daughter, Meghan, is a psychiatry resident, and his son, Nicholas, an MD-PhD student.
“We all strongly believe that we have to take care of others, but what it meant to me that my wife and my daughter followed me [to the hospital] is so much love. No matter if we lost everything or if we didn’t lose anything, we didn’t really care about that. We cared about making sure no lives were lost,” he says
Salgia has been working at the hospital every day this week. He has not yet been able to return to his home to see if it survived the fires. He doesn’t know. Friends have sent him some satellite views of his home — it appears as though his house might still be standing.
If it is, he credits his wife, because about a month ago she insisted they replace their roof with a fireproof roof.
“I’m being cautiously optimistic. I don’t know. We haven’t seen it. But if this is the case, it’s truly a miracle.”
He continues: “The healing process will be a long time, no question about that. But we will have to heal together and what important lessons we’ve learned through this crisis: that we together will survive better than individually.”
