Quilters, says Susie Freese, are like Rodney Dangerfield. “We get no respect,” she said in a telephone interview a month before the Heart of the Redwoods Quilt Show. “People don’t really understand what we do, and they don’t know how to value it.” Freese and the 175-member Redwood Empire Quilters Guild to which she belongs hope […]
Carol Harrison
Posted inNews
Probing Tools
St. Joseph Hospital is working feverishly to get Medicare to rescind an unpublicized order, issued in December, that could cut off vital federal payments unless the hospital proves that it has corrected “systemic” infection control flaws, including the improper cleaning of two diagnostic tools used on patients. The Journal has brought this hush-hush scrutiny to […]
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The Daycare Drought
It’s the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and the shopping rush is on. Amid the shopping chaos, the checkout line at Michaels, a crafts store in the Eureka Mall, stretches from the front to the back. Carissa Bowser-Smith is working a register, and is happy to do so. “Are you kidding?” she says. “To be where you […]
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Top of the Charts
Fortuna’s Russell Gorden is no stranger to hospitals or specialists. Since being diagnosed three years ago with cancer of the eye, Gorden has undergone 22 surgeries — the first of which removed his eye, ostensibly to solve the problem — and seen at least that many specialists. “When all of this started, there was a […]
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Taking It in the Teeth
Wayne Atkins is in a race: against cancer and the California budget. The state’s decision to eliminate adult dental care and eight other "optional" benefits from the Medi-Cal program effective July 1 recently sent Atkins and countless other North Coast residents into an all-out scramble to complete costly dental work prior to the state’s funding […]
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‘Immediate Jeopardy’
In the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, skilled nursing facilities — those quasi-medical institutions for old or severely disabled folks more commonly called “nursing homes” — are one of the few booming businesses going. On any given day, 1.5 million Americans reside in the nation’s nursing homes. More than 3 million annually rely […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
New Community Clinic in FTA?
The Redwood Memorial Hospital Foundation may undertake the construction of a federally qualified health center and physician offices on a 10-acre site opposite the hospital in Fortuna. The "federally qualified" designation is given to safety net providers such as community health centers, public housing centers, outpatient health programs and Indian Health Services. Qualified centers provide […]
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Mending Broken Hearts
Brent Hawkins sat down to breakfast in a Minnesota Marriott last summer. A Eureka resident for the past eight years, Hawkins heads a division of the agricultural giant Cargill. He travels frequently. Minnesota is his territory; USA Today his breakfast companion. It was Aug. 21 — the official unveiling of the government’s best estimates of […]