Smith: Why UCSF may just keep Jim Keegan

A delivery guy appeared on the 10th floor of the UCSF hospital the other evening with an entire feast for the unit’s nurses. Pizza, pasta, salad, the works.

Nobody there had ordered the food. The receipt revealed the benefactor to be a “friend of Jim Keegan’s.

Less than a week after heart transplant surgery, the good and generous Santa Rosa businessman and son of late community pillars James and Billie Keegan didn’t share in the meal. But for someone to use Italian take-out to thank his nurses did his new heart good.

The very next morning, what arrived for the staff of the 10th floor but great cartons of Starbuck’s coffee and pastries. Jim’s wife, Diane, thinks she knows who was behind that thanks-for-healing-him gift.

Pretty sweet. The special deliveries say a lot about how people regard the fellow in Room 1068 grateful to have received a young accident victim’s heart.

But if the treats keep coming, why in the world would the nurses ever let Keegan go?

___

YOU’VE LIKELY GOT QUESTIONS about the warring between the Democratic White House and Republican Congress over President Obama’s move to use executive authority to shield about 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation.

Some thoughtful women from throughout Sonoma County hope that a public forum they’re hosting Thursday evening will shed light on the issues, and on the lives that stand to be affected.

The conversation at the Glaser Center, inside the Mendocino Avenue home of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation, is sponsored by the League of Women Voters and three local branches of the American Association of University Women.

Who’ll speak?

Santa Rosa’s superintendent of schools, Socorro Shiels; Rashmi Singh, an immigrant from India; activist and immigrant Jesus Guzman, immigration consultant Victoria Guzman, immigrant attorney Christopher Keroski and Kim Mazzura of the access-to-education nonprofit 10,000 Degrees.

“It’s such a hot topic,” said Linda Heiser, president of the Santa Rosa chapter of AAUW. “It’s good to have knowledge.”

The program starts at 6:30 p.m. and allows time for Q&A and even refreshments.

___

SHE COULD HAVE DIED right there in the Coddingtown parking lot and never known what happened.

Janet Mondragon remembers walking into Coddingtown Jewelers for a ring repair, then heading back toward the mall’s main entrance, by the Starbucks. The next she knew, a man in a paramedic’s uniform was calling to her.

Mondragon, who lives in Middletown and works in Santa Rosa, had fallen in the parking lot and her head slammed onto the pavement.

“Apparently, I had a seizure,” she said. The medic bandaged a nasty wound to her head.

A nurse at the new Sutter hospital handed Mondragon a bag. Inside were her clothes, intact purse, the string of pearls she’d worn and a black sweatshirt she’d never seen before.

She assumes that a stranger or strangers saw her collapse, came to her aid, phoned 911, placed the sweatshirt beneath her head, watched over her and her things and stayed with her at least until an ambulance and fire crew arrived.

She’d like to say thank you.

Chris Smith is at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @CJSPD.