Doctor’s Healing Touch Tested Amid Quake’s ‘Combat Zone’

David Frankle is an emergency room doctor who likes to leave them laughing as he mends and tends folks at Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills.

Frankle is one of those high-intensity doctors who has handled all manner of medical emergencies, from the patient who came in with a barbecue fork stuck in his scalp to the suicidal guy who wanted to deck Frankle for saving his life.

“I’m good for the first 20 minutes of any medical emergency,” says the 44-year-old emergency medical specialist, with his ever-present laughter.

Two weeks ago, about 4:30 a.m., something temporarily wiped the smile off his face.

Frankle, who had been working the 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift, had been tending to the usual assortment of medical problems, including a man suffering with kidney stones, a woman with gall bladder problems and a constipated baby.

Then, with a roll like thunder and a violent series of jolts, Frankle was thrown six feet across the room.

The lights went out and, for a few moments, Frankle lay in stunned silence.

A few seconds later, the auxiliary generators turned the lights back on and Frankle picked himself up and started looking for his patients. The man with kidney stone problems had fallen off the gurney. Frankle helped him up and went to check on the gall bladder patient and the constipated baby and his parents.

“I tended to them as quickly as possible and sent them home,” he says. “They were eager to get out to see what had happened.”

For the rest of the day, the emergency room was jammed with people suffering from every imaginable injury, even though the hospital was officially closed because no one could be admitted as an in-patient.

“We were severely crippled,” says Frankle, “with broken water pipes and other fallout from the earthquake.

“Although the auxiliary generators could supply lights to the ER, we still had little power in the rest of the building,” he remembers. “We didn’t even have X-rays. I was setting dislocated shoulders by administering pain killers and then cracking them back into place.”

All of the hospital’s in-patients were transferred to facilities in other areas. “Most of the hospitals around Holy Cross were either packed to capacity or were also shut down,” Frankle says.

At 10:30 a.m.--then in his 16th hour of emergency doctoring--Frankle went home.

“I had not been able to reach my wife, so for a couple of hours I didn’t know how she was and I was worried about our 9-month-old baby,” says Frankle.

The next days in the emergency room saw one crisis after another.

“In a situation like the earthquake, people need to feel that things will get back to normal,” says Frankle. “When people are edgy and nervous it is a good time to inject a little humor. As the rock ‘n’ rolling continued, I kept going out into the waiting room to thank everyone for being patient and telling them to think of the aftershocks as a free Magic Mountain ride.”

Frankle is no stranger to combat-zone medicine: In 1980, he served four months as a medic for the United Nations in the killing fields of Cambodia.

After Cambodia, he took time to enjoy life.

“I was a professional ski bum for a number of months,” he says.

Now, as things struggle toward normalcy at the Holy Cross emergency room, Frankle is still thinking about the morning of the Pretty Big One.

“I felt sorry for all those who were hurt and frightened but the first few days were medical magic for me. It is the first time in a long time, I just got to treat my patients without worry about the paperwork and without having to fight for approval to act,” he says.

“It was just pure doctoring,” says Frankle. “It was great.”

No Real Need for ‘Where Were You’s’

For 30 years, people old enough to remember have recited where they were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

There will be little of that with the Northridge earthquake, because unless you are an emergency room doctor or some kind of furry night-flying mammal, you were probably in bed. Most of us, however, will remember what happened as the sun came up and we could see our surroundings clearly.

Most of us were not happy with the visuals, but were happy to be alive. Most of us gave up our long-standing rules about love, but do not disturb, your neighbor.

Cindy Sullivan of Sherman Oaks is a case in point. She has visited with her neighbors once, and only once, a year for decades.

“We have a barbecue in the summer at someone’s house,” she says.

But the earthquake brought about that old communal feeling. Like neighbors all across the Valley, her crowd almost automatically pulled together.

“We were all at each other’s house to see if everyone and everything was all right. That night we had a midseason barbecue for everyone,” she says.

Laurie Golden of Woodland Hills says her neighbors have always stuck together in good times and bad. She was the one, however, who went on the morning battery run.

“By 9 a.m. there was not a battery left in any of the stores around us, so I just headed out until I found enough for our neighborhood. In Pasadena,” she says.

Ten days after the quake it was still a mob scene at Winnetka Park, where dozens of families where still camping out. But something interesting was happening there.

The once tightly drawn lines between officials and victims were breaking down rapidly.

The consensus heroes of the park--the Red Cross and Salvation Army people--were sitting down with those camping out to eat the food the organizations had provided.

Everyone’s exhaustion had made them feel almost like family, one Red Cross volunteer said.

Even if there was a language barrier, there was a sense of community.

Overheard:

“I resent those East Coast newscasters who presume to know what Southern Californians are thinking. I particularly don’t like them trying to pump up the emotional volume on people who are faced with a lot of challenges just so the television programs will get bigger ratings.”

Man to others talking about the quake at the Woodland Hills Vons.