Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital a constant during Kincade fire

The whirlwind accompanying Stella York’s entry into the world matched the gusting forces that helped the Kincade fire almost double in size in barely 12 hours.

Stella was born Sunday at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, more than a month before her due date. Her mother, Keely Kilber, 20, of Lake County had a late-pregnancy liver complication and was transferred from her local Sutter hospital to Santa Rosa while she was in labor.

“It’s been scary, especially as a first-time mom, but overall it was worth all the scariness and trouble,” Kilber said as she rubbed her daughter’s rosy right cheek.

Born just under 6 pounds, Stella will remain in the newborn intensive care unit until she gets on track and can maintain her body temperature outside an incubator, Kilber said.

As her mother looked down at her, sharing her own warmth through endearing stares and a tight embrace, they had achieved a rare bit of solace in a hospital that has seen twice its daily intake after three other area hospitals were ordered to evacuate hundreds of patients in a matter of hours.

“It’s a huge change with fires and natural disasters (every year),” Kilber said. “It’s even scarier now with a little one in the world because now it’s like, ‘What do we do? Where do we go?’?”

The answer from the tireless workforce at Memorial Hospital? Right here.

Despite the challenges of sheltering a staff displaced by the largest evacuation order in Sonoma County history, caregivers worked longer shifts over consecutive days to meet the demands of a community with only one open hospital.

Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital, Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa Medical Center and the Healdsburg District Hospital were closed for a week or more since a historic windstorm put much of the county in the path of the Kincade fire. Kaiser reopened late Saturday, while the others remained shut.

As a result, a new battle emerged for this branch of first responders.

According to chief medical ?officer Chad Krilich, the emergency room treated a week-high of 221 patients Thursday, or about 100 more than its daily average.

“Our staff has been incredibly resilient through this whole experience, and they continue to rally and step forward,” said Todd Axberg, a lead nurse in the emergency room.

Axberg lost his home in the Mark West area during the Tubbs fire and last weekend had to evacuate the home he rebuilt, taking refuge in his car at the Petaluma Veterans Building with his bulldog, Huckleberry. He worked long hours for four days straight, managing a staff that has added roughly six workers to its usual baseline of 24 caregivers.

“Physicians have been absolutely incredible working in really difficult situations, and we don’t turn anyone away,” Axberg said. “They keep coming, and we’ll keep taking care of them. As long as we’re the only hospital functioning in Santa Rosa, that’s going to be our plan.”

Amid the dedication, there was an intensity to the work.

To meet the spiking demand, Dr. Omar Ferrari said ER physicians met with patients in the waiting room, carrying a stethoscope and laptop as they tried to accelerate cases.

A lack of humidity in operating rooms meant the hospital had to walk the tightrope of safely adding moisture without infecting the site.

Caseworkers had to identify skilled nursing facilities that had power during a PG&E shut-off that spread across ?38 counties and affected ?973,000 homes and businesses so that elderly patients could be safely transferred.

Short on supplies, supervisor of clinical dietetics at Memorial Hospital, Cali Scrivanich, said they had to turn to their community partners when shipping companies were unable to transport vital resources such as feeding tubes.

“It’s very therapeutic - personally, even - to see the kind of care and compassion that happens (in those moments),” she said. “It goes without saying, almost. You just show up and you do what you can to help.”

Cleanup crews have been working around the clock to ready the evacuated facilities at other hospitals since the Sheriff’s Office allowed residents to return home. Health officials are hoping to expedite all the necessary approvals to reopen as quickly as possible.

In the meantime, staff members from the closed sites have come to Memorial’s aid, working alongside their peers in the health care community as the regional demand for medical services gets funneled into one campus.

When Gudrun Reiter-?Hiltebrand, a Kaiser neonatal intensive care unit nurse who helped deliver Stella, arrived for her regular night shift Oct. 26, evacuations were already underway. She had spent ?15 years at Memorial Hospital, and quickly became a bridge for Kaiser helpers and aides from Sutter that had to use different tech and patient data systems in a unit that experienced a 60% increase in admissions.

Reiter-Hiltebrand said local health care workers have experience to lean on after two major fires in a two-year span, and it has been heartening to see the type of care that has been delivered.

“As tough as it is to work under these circumstances, the sense of support you get from being in a community that this happens to” makes this challenge easier to work through, Reiter-Hiltebrand said. “People say ‘Sutter babies,’ ‘Kaiser babies,’ but these are community babies.”

You can reach Staff Writer Yousef Baig at 707-521-5390 or yousef.baig@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @YousefBaig