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Source Medpagetoday
In 2018, I was a young medical resident working on a spinal cord injury unit at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration (VA) when the fast-moving Camp Fireopens in a new tab or window decimated the town of Paradise, California. The unit was filled with veterans with varying degrees of severe physical disability, some dependent on ventilators for breathing, others entirely bedbound. As the wildfire swept through the Sierra Nevada mountains, smoke filled the VA campus. As a medical team, we rushed to protect our patients from this new (to us) threat, closing windows and administering breathing support, hoping the smoke would not be the straw that broke their already tenuous respiratory status.
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