By SARAH SHMERLING | Editor-in-Chief
Just 10 days after losing his Highlands home in the Palisades fire, Dr. Damon Raskin was helping patients out of an office in Santa Monica. Now, the doctor has returned to his Palisades office, seeing patients full-time from his Sunset Boulevard space.
“I was actually working in my office on that Tuesday,” Raskin said of the day the fire started. “We had just come back from a beautiful Christmas vacation with my two kids the day before.”
Students at Palisades Charter High School and Berkeley, Raskin’s kids were still on winter break the day of the fire, so they were at the Highlands home. He and his wife, who both work at the office, were at work.
After taking a couple of weeks off, Raskin said he was very busy that day, catching up and focused on seeing patients. He was looking for his wife at the office when someone told him she went up to go check on the fire.
She then called, describing to Raskin not being permitted to go up Palisades Drive to get to the house. They talked to their kids, told them to bring the dogs and “just get out.”
With fire on either side of Palisades Drive, Raskin said their kids were “really stuck and traumatized,” but they eventually made it out and evacuated to a friend’s house in the Riviera. When the fire started to head that direction, the were forced to relocate to a hotel in Santa Monica.
They found out the next day that their house had burned down.
“Seeing the house for the first time with all the dirt and rubble and the twisted metal, we really were not able to get anything out,” Raskin said. “My daughter just got our passports and the dogs and that was it … our whole block was decimated, all but one house on our block.”
While processing his own shock, Raskin said he started to get “call after call after call, non-stop” from patients who had lost their medicines in the fire.
“They all wanted their medicines replaced,” Raskin said, “I had no office, I had no staff … I did my best to replace everyone’s medicines.”
Then, through his practice, Raskin—an internal medicine practitioner, specializing in preventive medicine and rehabilitation—was able to find a temporary place to live and work: One patient was going to list their Santa Monica home for rent soon, allowing Raskin to rent it “very reasonably priced,” and then Dr. Bob Baravarian opened up his “big office” to allow Raskin and his staff to see patients at his Santa Monica space a few days per week.
“We couldn’t do all the normal things we did, but we were able to at least see patients and [do] refills and checkups,” Raskin described. “When patients had urgent needs, we were able to get them taken care of and that was a blessing.”
Then on Tuesday, May 27—nearly five months after the start of the Palisades fire—Raskin was able to return to his Palisades office at 17383 Sunset Boulevard in Suite B280. The office is “totally cleaned and fresh smelling,” Raskin described, and some things had to be replaced.
“It’s so nice because patients, when they come in here, they smile, they tell me, ‘Welcome home,’” Raskin said of reopening. “It’s really nice and touching and special that I’m able to be back in a community where people have all lost so much and we’ve all lost our town, but I’m able to be able to be there for them like I was before.”
To reach Raskin’s office, call 310-459-4333. They are open Monday to Friday, from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and 2 to 5 p.m.
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