A Faithful Healer of Seared Souls

The surgeon strode through the doorway stripping latex gloves from his hands and issuing commands.

“Get that room ready,” he called out, calm yet urgent. “We’ve got another one coming.”

An important call was waiting. As he reached for the telephone, the white-haired doctor offered a weak grin to the reporters hovering about.

“Another day in the life,” he said with a sigh. Then he rubbed fatigue from his blue eyes and took the phone.

Tuesday wasn’t just another day for Dr. A. Richard Grossman, the 60-year-old founder and director of the burn center at Sherman Oaks Hospital and Health Center. He is a busy man these days, very much in demand. There are burn patients, victims of the raging firestorms, whose lives hang in the balance. There are media that demand images and quotes (and, don’t forget, a hospital that doesn’t mind the publicity).

An eavesdropper could tell that Grossman was worried about something else. It turned out that, between emergency treatments for burn victims and interviews, the doctor was worried about whether his wife, Marilyn, would find a safe route home from the city to their place in the horse country of Hidden Valley.

“He thought the freeway might be closed at Topanga,” Marilyn explained later. “He had his O. R. nurse call me. . . . He’s so on edge with the fire we had in our own back yard, he didn’t know what was happening.”

Our own back yard. This isn’t just a figure of speech. Last week, as Grossman and his staff of doctors and nurses treated four Los Angeles city firefighters severely injured in the first wave of firestorms, a strike team of firefighters was stationed on the Grossmans’ 63-acre spread.

Thus, a man who had built a career healing the victims of fire was threatened by fire himself.

“You start seeing it come over the hill, and then it’s on your property. That’s a pretty weird feeling,” Marilyn recalled. Aircraft dumped fire retardant. “They were flying so low I could practically see the whites of their eyes.”

Twenty acres burned, but their home was spared. Now the landscape is colored with the black of charcoal and the pink of fire retardant.

“I’ve gotten to really love pink,” Grossman said. “That stuff is all over the back yard.”

If the doctor was edgy Tuesday, it didn’t show. If anything he seemed to be very much in his element, tending to both patients and the media. Surgeons are sometimes regarded as the swaggering fighter pilots of the medical profession.

Grossman comes off as a commanding officer--self-assured, witty and smoothly aware that the fortunes of the burn center are not merely rooted in how well it treats its patients. Public image also is an important matter. And this facility is very much Grossman’s baby.

Next year, the center will turn 25, but its roots date back to the late 1950s, when Grossman was a young doctor at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. He was in charge of the emergency room when a fire trapped students at a nearby Catholic school one winter day.

“I had to count 98 dead children, all suffocated or burned to death. The catastrophe indelibly stayed in my mind,” he once told an interviewer.

Years later, he would persuade directors of Sherman Oaks Hospital to reserve two beds for burn victims. It grew to five beds, then 15. Now it is the largest private nonprofit burn unit in the country, with 10 intensive-care beds, 20 intermediate beds, two operating rooms, an outpatient clinic and a rooftop heliport that was very busy Tuesday.

“I’ve got great nurses who’ve been here 10, 15, 20 years,” Grossman said. “I’ve got doctors upon doctors, everybody working as a team.”

If you believe the clippings, it’s one of the best places in the world for burn patients. I have no reason to doubt this, but reporters are supposed to be skeptical. We’re not to just accept the hype on faith.

This was my first encounter with Grossman and, I must confess, he was so smooth with the media that I had to wonder. . . .

I was doubly skeptical when a colleague, upon learning that I was planning to write about Dr. A. Richard Grossman, sent me a piece of e-mail.

“St. Richard,” she wrote.

St. Richard? Does that sound sarcastic or what?

When I asked her about this, she told me a story. Eleven years ago, she explained, her daughter was burned in a restaurant accident. She spent a month at her daughter’s side in the burn center and saw Grossman work in a way that no reporter covering a news conference would ever witness--not as a media-minded administrator but as a healer.

He was gentle and kind. He delighted in telling his patients that they were in the very same room as Richard Pryor. Dr. Grossman, she said, lifted people’s spirits.

So, no, she wasn’t being sarcastic.

“I just think,” she told me, “the man is a magician.”

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write Harris at The Times Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth, Calif. 91311.